


The Long Haul

by apiphile



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Ballet, F/M, I made up what I felt like making up, I write about London because I know London, IT department politics, Lack of Safewords, London, London is my favourite character in this, M/M, Mild BDSM which I probably have to warn for, My participation in this fandom has been non-existent so I don't know the fanon, Scars, Slapping, Writing OFCs is a genuine pleasure, a lot more backstory than got into the fic, almost like writing fanfic or something, fetishisation of scars, fuck I'm out of tagging practice, i had to end it where i did or i would have lost a bet with my girlfriend, man i have so many headcanons about m/bond ask me all about it, several scenes in bathrooms, socially awkward people being fail, that cake shop is a real place and it's great you should go there, the world's most frustrating protagonist, um, weird hobbies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-24
Updated: 2013-03-24
Packaged: 2017-12-06 08:51:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/733810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two socially inept people fail their way towards an arrangement at considerable length.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Haul

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jar/gifts), [LizaPod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LizaPod/gifts), [vigilantejam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vigilantejam/gifts).



Q Branch never left the tunnels after refurbishment. Mallory’s memos gave a lot of half-formed reasons, concerning security and funding, but nothing that stood out as more of a reason than Geek Branch – as they were known more-or-less uniformly in MI6 – being deathly allergic to daylight. Q and his team (coincidentally also five eighths of his favourite WoW raiding party) preferred the tunnels. So in the tunnels they remained, like a high-tech band of Morlocks: a reference which a distressing number of top brass both recognised, and laughed at.

The Geek Branch and top brass had little to do with each other. It was eight months after Mallory’s appointment (which was not long enough for the head of Geek Branch to have stopped being irritated and bruised-ego’d at the breach of his security) before the summons came, and a cord-thin, top-tier nerd in a sleeveless jumper found himself failing to relax on a 1930s Chesterfield in the anteroom outside Mallory’s office.

Eve was on either a lunch break or a dinner break: his watch said it was four in the afternoon, but to the head of Q Branch meals happened when he remembered to eat, and all hours were potentially hastily-inhaled sandwich o’clock. Summer sun assaulted him through the half-closed blinds – standard office issue, out of keeping with the War-era decor of the room – and cast stripes of shadow over the Quartermaster’s face.

Mallory’s door opened in silence, and an apologetic-looking Tanner slipped out. “He’ll be a while yet,” he said, and pulled the door to behind him without affording Q a glimpse of the interior. “I’ve been sent to keep you company.”

“I don’t need company,” Q said, confused.

“Well, he doesn’t want me in there. Bond’s getting an extended dressing-down.” Tanner perched stiffly on the edge of Eve’s desk, apparently at a loss as to what to do with his hands without his customary sheaf of files. Q felt he ought to be able to sympathise, but sympathy had never been his strong suit. It ranked slightly above sports.

There was something about Tanner’s face, Q had always though, which made him look like a rabbit. A softness, or roundness, and a small mouth. He was the kind of man you could see being a _real_ spy. Bond and the other, mostly dead, double-ohs used their memorable faces and known names to bludgeon their opposition – the various ne’erdowells they came up against – into fearful submission. Tanner one could see sliding unnoticed through any crowd, wearing his subordinate face and carrying someone else’s vitally important confidential papers. 

Of course the memorability or not of a man’s features played less of a part in their mutability than one would think: one of M’s failed projects, found dead in Birmingham in the winter of some fatal flaw in his heart, had a face like a statue of an angel, but the peculiar ability to take on almost any role to the extent that he was nearly unrecognisable when in motion.

Q realised there had been a lengthy pause in which he stared vacantly at Tanner’s face, and that Tanner hadn’t remarked on it at all.

In Mallory’s office the word ‘fucking’ came through the thick wooden door loud and clear, but the journey through robbed it of its origin. It was a disembodied, ownerless curse.

“Coffee?” Tanner asked, presently.

“Tea,” Q corrected, his fingers twitching.

“Oh, yes,” Tanner said, getting off the desk at once. “Earl Grey. Never met a techie who didn’t subsist entirely on coffee before.”

“Gulheed has a crippling Boost habit,” Q said, his mouth taking its own initiative while his mind worried away at and rifled through what, precisely, Mallory might want from him. If it was to do with budgeting, Q thought, he should really have brought Oladipo up with him, or in his stead, to argue on his behalf. 

“Any _objection_ to coffee?” Tanner asked, busy with the kettle below the line of sight at Eve’s desk. 

“Is there no tea?”

“No, just curious.” Tanner gave him the blank, stretched smile Q had seen him give when Bond told jokes. ‘Jokes’ was usually pushing it a bit. The man had the sense of humour of a shovel, and did better when he had a straight man to play off, which none of Q Branch, at least, was prepared to be.

“When they make coffee that tastes of bergamot, and not of soil,” Q assured him, still miles away with his thoughts, “I’ll consider it.”

Another pause swept between them like a cold wind and took Q with it into a hive of thoughts regarding the use of RFID implants for agent tracking. The level of encryption needed to prevent enemy misuses would be impressive, some sort of cloaked or even disruptive signal pattern –

The kettle came to the boil. Conscious that this lull in conversation had gone on for some time and was entirely his fault, Q jerked his head up and said the first thing that came into his mind and wasn’t about RFID implants, which was unfortunately: “You name is _really_ Henry?”

Tanner continued to pour hot water into two mugs, but gave Q an unblinking look of what Q assumed was disapproval, and said, “I suppose the word ‘confidential’ means nothing to you.”

Q felt the only rational response to such a silly question was to roll his eyes, and so he did.

“Obviously I wasn’t suggesting you _can’t_ ,” Tanner said, plopping a tea bag into each of the mugs on the desk, “I’m saying you could have asked me.”

“Didn’t occur to me,” said Q, who had been after entirely different information while rifling through personnel files that particular 5am. 

“No,” said Tanner, “I don’t suppose it did. Milk?”

“No.” Q watched Tanner give himself a generous splash of milk and three sugars, and concluded that whatever he was drinking, it wasn’t Earl Grey. No one drank Earl Grey with milk and sugar unless they were mentally deranged.

“Any reason?” Tanner asked, fishing the bag out and performing the Dance of Tea Bag: lifting it and lowering it again with his spoon, as if that would shake out some more tea. Q knew it well from every single time he’d actually reached the end of making a cup and not been distracted halfway through. “For the incredulity: I’m sure the intrusion is mandatory.”

Q accepted the cup of tea and held it as if he was in the arctic, instead of an anteroom in the sun which was in fact slightly too warm after the tunnels. He thought: I could say something snotty about his background. He’s expecting it.

_Henry_ wasn’t a name one usually associated with indistinct, grey men like Tanner: his school records had stood out amid his generation, for where field agents had a sea of old school ties and crests, Tanner had an unassuming Chislehurst comprehensive and a doggedly consistent rise to St John’s and recruitment. He’d ascended to his place at Mallory’s feet not by being a ‘boy genius’ – Q sneered internally at the epithet, uncomfortable as ever with it – or with Bond’s arrogance of breeding and disregard for personal safety, but just through working bloody hard, _all the time_.

He toyed with the idea of playing on the evident chip on the man’s shoulder, but found he’d already opened his mouth and explained, “Well it’s my name, too.”

“I know,” said Tanner, his tea untouched.

“You—“

“I have _legitimate_ access to personnel records,” Tanner said, sipping tea gingerly. “International School in Qatar, university acceptance at fourteen.” He failed to meet Q’s eyes. “It’s my job.”

“Your job appears to be everything,” Q said, too amused at being momentarily beaten to be peevish at the casual uncovering of bald, bare fact. 

“More or less,” agreed Henry Tanner.

The door to Mallory’s room opened again, and Q cursed inwardly at the potential waste of a cup of tea, forgetting in that second just how many he himself had left to go cold, abandoned, or spilled over himself.

“Tanner,” Mallory said, impatient and clipped. He looked around at Q, gave him a confused look, and added, “What are you doing here?”

“You told me to come,” Q said, hanging onto his tea with both hands.

“Did I? Well, I don’t have time for you now.” Mallory pulled the door open further as if ushering a schoolboy back into his office. “In. I need you to brief Bond.”

* * *

It was three months before he saw anything of Tanner again: they contrived to miss each other repeatedly. The summer had shuffled off to mutter in the southern hemisphere, and Q reluctantly added another jumper to his ensemble as the tunnels became superconductively cold. 

It’s ten o’clock,” Tanner said mildly, in place of ‘hello’. Q was relieved at that much: greeting annoyed him and struck him as rather unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. He didn’t turn away from the screen, but offered a little acknowledgement:

“I’m aware of the time. Did you need something?”

A moment later he realised he could at least have used the man’s name, having gone to the trouble of remembering it, but it was too late by then.

“Eve sent me to ask if you wanted to come for a drink,” Tanner said, and Q frowned into his empty mug of tea.

“ _Why?_ ”

He caught the movement of Tanner’s shrug reflected in the glass of the main screen. “Why does anyone go for drinks?” Tanner added in a more confidential tone, “It’s my belief she intends to nobble you for some project of her own –“

“She can pay a consultancy fee like everyone else,” Q sighed, putting the computer into a sleep cycle and rolling down his sleeves as he turned, at last. Much to his surprise Tanner was _not_ wearing a suit, although having shed his civil service disguise he looked even more unmemorable, just another thirty-something man-child in a games t-shirt, an interchangeable hoodie, and Issued To All Men At Thirty jeans. There was little to choose between him and innumerable men that Q had worked with, both here and in the private sector, under both his flashy nom-de-guerre and the fair less heroic burden of his _actual name_.

“You get paid more than she does,” Tanner observed, raising his eyebrows fractionally. “More than I do, too.”

“I assume this means I’m buying,” Q said, a little testily, as he picked up his coat from the chair: where he’d put it eight or nine hours ago, meaning to hang it up ‘in a minute’.

“I assume that means you’re coming,” Tanner countered, holding the door open for him.

The air had the crystalline, sharp quality of a winter night that was debating whether or not to snow, and Q’s breath made entire weather systems in front of him as they attained street level. There was a ring of frost around the moon, dying it brown in collaboration with the reflected haze of the city’s street lights. 

“Where are we going?” he asked, as Tanner’s breath bloomed its own fog bank into the night, enveloping his. It was quiet out: a late weeknight on Whitehall.

“The usual,” Tanner said, lowering his head and raising his shoulders against the cold, until he looked even more compact than normal.

Q sighed. “Do I look – doesn’t it say something in my _file_ about how often I socialise in _pubs_ with _colleagues?”_

“No,” Tanner said, and Q saw the faint pull of a smile on his small mouth. “We reserve that kind of interest for field agents, top tier, and the likely-to-defect.”

“No one cares what support staff do,” Q translated, following him down the icy street. “Suits me.”

“Well, no one’s going to break into _your_ house and put a knife to your throat, either,” said Tanner. His inflection wasn’t quite right, but Q was more preoccupied with the mental image this generated. One could see Bond fighting off an intruder stark bullock naked, and feeding them their own knife – indeed, one couldn’t be sure it hadn’t already happened at least once – but Tanner was another matter. It was very hard to picture him at home at all.

“Has that happened?” Q asked, at last. 

Another very small smile twitched at Tanner’s lapine mouth, and Q stopped in the street as the man only said, almost primly, “Guess.”

“Look,” Q said, suddenly irritated in part from the evasiveness and in part _at_ his own irritation, which seemed even to him to be mysterious and disproportionate, “I should tell you I’m a terrible judge of character. People aren’t really my thing. Area. I have no idea if you’re trying to pull my leg here, but _stop_.”

“Herself did describe you as ‘oblivious to the point of caricature’,” Tanner agreed, his smile becoming a little more present. “Or did you not read that?”

“I didn’t look at my _own_ profile,” Q snorted, walking again. There was no reason to. They could hardly tell him anything about himself that he didn’t know, and the point of the exercise had been gathering information on _other people_. 

“That was the _first_ thing I looked for,” Tanner said. He had his hands deep in his pockets. Q was seized by a brief surge of curiosity regarding what Tanner had found about himself in his file, and if any of it had surprised him.

“Here,” Tanner added, holding open the door to a pub seething with off-duty civil servants and stained wood.

Q didn’t exactly feel an uprising of warm human feeling at stepping into the hot, loud, Whitehall-toadies-infested pub. For one, his glasses fogged up immediately and left him temporarily blind and uncomfortably overheated; for another, his colleague abandoned him for the bar without a word; a third revealed that there were no tables free, and when he wiped his glasses and draped his coat over his arms, effectively disabling himself, he couldn’t see Eve, either.

I’m going to put bestiality porn in your hard drive, Q thought, in Tanner’s general direction. It was his standard, untweaked threat to people who mildly displeased him: anyone who caused him serious displeasure could have far bigger problems to deal with, like being locked out of their _entire life_. He’d dialled back the vengeful hacking side of things for the sake of the career, but there were times when the temptation to put someone on the sex offenders register was almost akin to what he imagined nicotine cravings were like.

Tanner returned with two drinks rather quicker than Q would have expected with the scrum at the bar: evidently Tanner had a few tricks up his nondescript sleeve. He accepted the pint of IPA without commenting that Tanner hadn’t asked what he wanted and that IPA Greene was would hardly be anyone’s first guess for a slightly fey-looking nerd with the body fat of a toothpick and the masculine qualities of a bottle of pink nail polish.

Tanner held a glass of orange juice for himself. No doubt the barman had assumed the inverse of the order’s reality: Q failed to wonder why he wasn’t drinking, as more pressing questions grabbed his attention.

“Where’s Eve?” Q asked, when he’d taken the excess off his pint and wasn’t in danger of having it jogged down his whole body any more. The air was loud with public school accents and stupid laughs.

“Not coming,” Tanner said, leaning unobtrusively on the wall. “She has an engagement.”

Q wasn’t sure quite what it was about this utterly unhelpful explanation that screamed about the hand of Bond and likelihood of expensive jewellery in Eve’s evening. Perhaps some very shallow emphasis on ‘engagement’ he’d not been consciously aware of. He sipped patiently at his pint, coat hanging heavy on his arm, and said, “So she deputised you?”

“That’s your first conclusion?” Tanner asked, holding out his arm and gesturing with his head at Q’s coat. He had to do it three or four times before Q realised this was what he was doing, and when he got it he was childishly tempted to cling onto the coat.

“Eve doesn’t know anything about this,” Q said, into his beer. “Okay. What do _you_ want?”

“Guess,” Tanner said again. He looked almost as uncomfortable as Q felt.

“I don’t like guessing games,” said Q, who had a relationship with cryptography which bordered on a passionate illicit affair, and one with social cues which had been painstakingly built up with a number of books on psychology and frustratingly patronising DVDs. He was, he was aware, a long way out of his depth the moment conversation turned away from things with motherboards.

“And I’m not a fan of being all that direct,” said Tanner, with a small, mirthless smile. “So this might take a while.”

He finished his drink, handed Q back his coat, and left the pub. Q stood encumbered with a frown, a coat, and a nearly-full pint, wandering exactly what sort of test had just taken place, and how badly he’d failed it.

* * *

It was a matter of personal pride to find the field agents tedious, since everyone else was so star-struck by them, but in spite of his wasteful nature and conservative meting out of conversation, Q found he wasn’t able to prevent himself from liking Bond.

He was just shy of being old enough to be Q’s father, but behaved like a grumpy teenager: it shouldn’t have been endearing – Q had heard that emotional maturity was considered a desirable trait in middle-aged men – but it was. After some study, Q had concluded that it was the rare moments of focus Bond bestowed upon people that charmed them: occasionally he made eye-contact and looked like he could not only _be_ anything one wanted him to be, but that he _wanted_ to do that.

As a result, Q resented being sent out to equip him slightly less than he would have any other field agent.

The London Museum was teeming with school parties, which provided the perfect cover to drop a very elegant briefcase while standing next to a portrait of Oliver Cromwell, and for Bond to pick it up as if he’d had it all along. As he did, Bond muttered out of the side of his mouth: “Comb your bloody hair.”

“ _Shave_ ,” Q muttered in return, and he ambled aimlessly around the rest of the exhibit, revelling in his not-entirely-faked persona of absent-minded academic dweeb. By the time he got to the exit, and made a show of examining a lot of things in the gift shop which failed to interest him in any way, Bond was long-gone, and Eve was phoning him.

“What?” he asked, nearly walking into a rotunda of books on his way out.

“You’ve got an appointment to see M at three,” she said, apparently amused. “How’s our favourite thug?”

“Unshaven,” Q said. “What appointment?”

“Tanner said you’d have forgotten,” she said, still amused. “That’s why I called. Good thing I did. Don’t you have a calendar on that miniature computer you keep pretending is a phone?”

“Well, going by last time,” Q said, refraining from mention that he had several calendars and no attention span for filling them in, “Mallory’s forgotten as well.”

“That’s his prerogative,” Eve reminded him. “Yours is to come and raid the tea drawer again. Don’t leave it looking like ferrets had a party in it this time.”

When he reached the anteroom, Eve was eating honeydew melon chunks out of a cellophane-topped container over her keyboard. She offered him one with an expression that said she didn’t want them either.

“Take one,” she insisted, trying to stare him down. “I don’t want them. Also, if you have a Twix I will give you ...” she glanced under the desk, “Thirty quid. Thirty-five. Whatever’s in my wallet.”

“No, thanks,” said Q, whose stomach chose that moment to rumble petulantly. “Don’t do fruit.”

“You were right,” Eve said, pushing her melon slices into the bin with a graceful and entirely dismissive wave of her hand. “He’s not even here. I would put money on him having forgotten it completely. Sorry.”

“If he knew in the first place,” Q said, not far enough under his breath for Eve to miss. She turned the monitor and showed him the appointments list, and the authorisations.

“ _He_ made it.”

“His login made it. Password security in this place is pathetic. Naoko is tearing her hair out over it.” Q shared little with the head of Vauxhall HQ’s IT security, apart from intense contempt for the login-sharing antics of admin staff, and the endless frustration of all technical personnel confronted with the wilful incompetence of their superiors that everyone in that field had to face.

Eve relented, and gestured to the Chesterfield. “Might as well make yourself comfortable.”

Something nagged at the back of Q’s mind, but it was overtaken by a sharp mental reminder of how much work he currently had to do. He stood, and told her he’d come back ‘at once’ if Mallory actually asked for him.

Sometime around midnight, Q stopped in the middle of recoding a keylogger for technically useless field agents, said, “FUCKING MIND GAMES,” out loud to the empty room, and proceeded to break into every single account associated with Henry Tanner that he could uncover.

He made a thorough inventory of the man’s finances, medical records, home situation, email accounts, email correspondence. He spent a brisk ten minutes resurrecting, remotely, all of his deleted emails of the last five days, but the limitations of logins were against him and he came away burdened with knowledge, but no wisdom. 

In a fit of irritation which owed as much to low blood sugar and sleep deprivation as it did to Tanner, Q turned on the man’s laptop webcam, with a very quiet voice in his head nagging him about the ethics of this.

It didn’t make him feel any better that the small nagging voice sounded like Tanner saying, _you could have asked me_.

To Q’s disappointment, he got a glimpse only of the inside of Mallory’s office, which he knew well enough, and if he was under the impression that Tanner had left the laptop open and gone home (reasonable considering the hour) he was disabused of the notion when he saw a pair of suited arms change position, and heard the faint whistling sound of sleep.

The sense of voyeuristic victory collapsed and left Q somewhat miserable. He left the view window open, but went back to the keylogger with a guilty kind of vigour.

* * *

Typically, Q didn’t bother to check his pay notifications. He had enough money for everything he could possibly need that HQ wouldn’t just let him take from Requisitions. He was off in a particularly tricky set of internal calculations when his debit card was declined in Sainsburys, and he paid in pocket change, barely registering the impatient grumbles behind him as he left with tea and toilet paper.

Half-way to work it occurred to him to try the thing in an ATM, which promptly ate it.

“Bastard,” Q said to the machine, disbelieving.

He filled out two petty cash forms on arrival, loaded himself up with more shrapnel, and decided he would just work through the night instead of trying to walk all the way home or wrestle with getting a taxi on account. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Q arrived in his offices to find a post-it note stuck to his laptop screen with the word “APOLOGISE” written on it in very neat capital letters.

He screwed it into a ball and dropped it in his coat pocket. Apologies were not his forte, in part because he frequently couldn’t recall what it was he was supposed to have done that was that terrible.

Around three that afternoon he began to find focussing difficult, in that rather fuzzy way that suggested he’d pushed the limits of hypoglycaemia too far again.

“Bugger,” said Q, and tried to talk Gulheed into going on a mercy dash for the shops.

At six-thirty, Tanner showed up with an egg sandwich and a sheaf of forms for him to sign. “I thought you might be hungry,” he said, not mentioned that he also knew Q’s habits well enough to know exactly what he was hungry for. Q couldn’t work out if this was a terrible indictment on the monotony of his diet, or if Tanner really was just that observant.

“My card got eaten this morning,” Q said, as if that excused every other time he’d skated close to comatose in the pursuit of a goal without adequate provisions.

“Yes, there’s a tag on your account.” 

Q stopped chewing and regarded him as icily as he could with a mouthful of half-masticated egg and white bread (no mayonnaise, no pepper). He tried out a number of responses in his head, but felt none of them really conveyed quite how pissed off he was. After a while he swallowed, skipped about thirty percent of the expected conversation, and said, “Apologise for _what_?”

Tanner took the forms back with another of his stretched smiles, and said, “The problem with genius is you assume that everyone else is very stupid, when we can’t keep up with _everything_ you do. I don’t use my webcam. I do, however, keep an eye on the news, and when I read about unpleasant sorts hacking them...”

“Oh,” said Q, summarising the lost end of Tanner’s point in the words ‘tracking’ and ‘logs’. 

“Sloppy,” Tanner said, sounding almost disappointed. “Can’t have an espionage agent who doesn’t cover his tracks.”

Q felt his face growing hot. “Am I going to be able to afford a taxi home?”

Tanner looked at the forms for a while. “You could say you’re sorry. If you _are_.”

Q wasn’t. The idea that people were entitled to privacy had rather been eroded over the course of his life, and he’d never been all that convinced of it in the first place. But he frowned, and said, “Regrettable lapse in judgement,” towards the floor around Tanner’s feet.

“There are other ways,” Tanner said, taking the sandwich box out of Q’s hands. His fingers came close to touching, but didn’t quite brush skin. 

About half an hour after he left, Q removed the tag from his own account and, by way of a more meaningful apology, transferred three thousand into Tanner’s from his own.

* * *

“Celebratory drinks at HQ,” Eve said, bursting out of the speakers like an alarm clock the moment Q misguidedly accepted the incoming call.

“Don’t do socialise,” said Q, “especially not with the people who are in charge of my career.”

“Not an invitation, an order,” she said, sounding entirely too happy about it. The call was evidently coming from where the drinks were already being had, as there was a great deal of background noise.

“I don’t appreciate being bossed around,” he said, stiffly. He thought he heard a snigger at this, but with the ambient noise at the other end it was hard to tell. 

“So I’ve heard,” Eve said, and there was the tail-end of a snort of laughter in her voice, too. “Come on, James wants to see you.”

“He knows where to find me,” Q said, aware that this was tantamount to _asking_ the most dangerous man in MI6 to break into his home when he wasn’t expecting it and scare the piss out of him.

“It’s Christmas, Henry—“

“I’m Jewish,” Q said, because he was damned if he was going to let her know how much he detested being called by his first name.

“No you’re not.”

“Then I’m a Muslim,” Q said, clutching at straws.

“Nice try, but Gulheed’s here inhaling the buffet and undermining you with vol-au-vents.”

“That traitor.”

“Oh, come on. I won’t bite.”

Q thought that if he were Bond he’d have said, “Then I definitely won’t come,” but he was very much _not_ Bond, and so he said, “No,” testily and cut off the call.

Forty minutes after this, Henry Tanner came in and turned the power off.

“I was in the middle of –“ he snapped, as a torchlight shone in his eyes.

“Mallory deems attendance, or at least ‘not working’, compulsory,” Tanner said, jingling car keys at him in the dark.

“Someone should tell him forced conviviality isn’t very seasonal or indeed very convivial.” Q groped about for his coat, and found it thrust into his hands.

“He’ll be there. You can tell him yourself,” Tanner suggested, holding the door open and playing the torch beam up the stairs.

The car was too warm after the cold shock of winter air, and both the windows and Q’s glasses steamed up at once, leaving him again blind and humid.

“Into the herd of Savile Row suits I go, in my M&S jumper,” he said, smudging the lenses of his glasses on the sleeve of the offending item.

“My suit’s from Primark,” Tanner said, and Q got his glasses back on in time to see the small, rabbit-mouthed smile make another appearance as they pulled away.

As Q had dismally predicted, the meeting room at Vauxhall HQ was stuffed with good tailoring and watches that cost more than Tanner’s car. It didn’t matter how many costly outfits there were, however: the room was still a meeting room with the tables take out. There was cheap tinsel everywhere, in the grand tradition of all office parties, and a good chance that the ‘champagne’ being quaffed was wholesale Cava.

Even Q, and Tanner in his Primark suit, didn’t look as hopelessly out of place as Q had thought: Oladipo was still wearing his woolly hat indoors, and Gulheed was wearing the same _All Roads Lead to 192.168.2.1_ t-shirt that she’d been working in. She was, also, trying to balance a small mountain of catered snacks on a paper plate with her characteristic expression of fierce concentration.

“Coat,” Tanner said, behind him, and Q shrugged it off without thinking. Someone – not Tanner – took off with it before he could stop them.

“I don’t know half these people,” Q muttered.

“You never leave your bunker,” Tanner said. “I’d be surprised if you knew even _half_ of them.”

“I’m going to get drunk,” Q said, the idea coming as a welcome revelation. “And hide in the toilets.”

He spotted Bond, talking – or rather listening, which was more his style – to four people at once, a champagne flute in hand. Bond caught his eye, gestured to his own perfectly-shaven face with a tiny smirk, and raised his eyebrows. Q reached up for his hair, and found that after a day of fiddling with it, lost in thought, he looked like a haystack waylaid by a hurricane.

He averted his gaze, found himself looking at Tanner instead, and had accepted a comb from him before he realised that this made no _sense_.

“Why have you got this?” Q hissed, attacking his rebellious locks hurriedly. “You don’t have any _hair_.”

“Goodness, you made it,” Mallory said, passing him without stopping. “Excellent work, Tanner. Did you use a cattle prod?”

Q didn’t catch Tanner’s reply, because everyone was talking at once and making a sound not dissimilar to a flock of rooks. Instead, he watched Eve join Bond in his conversation, and stake her claim over him by sliding her hand not into his, but around his wrist, like a manacle. Q’s cheeks grew uncomfortably hot.

The grand old warship might be getting towed out for scrap, but it was being towed out with a certain amount of dignity this time, and it had – Q strained his own metaphor a little – a very apposite and apparently welcome tugboat.

“The toilets you want are probably the basement ones,” Tanner said, from his elbow. Q found him holding a bottle of Perriet Jouet and a single key on a thin keyring, and wearing an unreadable expression.

Q raised his eyebrows. “I was expecting Tesco Own Brand Cava on our budget.”

“That’s what everyone _else_ is drinking,” Tanner said, giving him the sole key on its tiny ring. “This was reserved for the bigwigs.”

“I’m not –“

“I’m M’s right hand man,” Tanner said, peacefully. “I get what I ask for.” He looked like he was about to say something else, but whatever it was died in his throat. He had a thick neck, Q noted. It was probably quite strong.

He probably _did_ , Q thought. No one questions what the extended reach of Mallory wants... or whether it’s really Mallory doing the asking.

“Do you want me to show you the way?” Tanner asked, cutting into Q’s thoughts. From his tone, it wasn’t the first time he’d had to ask.

“I thought you were stricken with a desperate need for me to be _here_ ,” Q said, inclining his head to say _lay on, MacDuff_.

“Mallory told me to get you to the party,” Tanner said, leading them both out of the overly-warm, crowded, tinsel-infested nightmare of a governmental Christmas party not a moment too soon. “He was less forthcoming on _keeping_ you in it.”

The stairs down to the basement were locked by card pass: Tanner opened them, and let Q through first. He followed down the unpainted concrete corridor, carrying the fraudulently-obtained Perriet Jouet by the neck, like a club. Q was quite sure that wasn’t how he carried it around the Old School Tie mob, when he was blending in, or rather rendering himself entirely invisible.

“Left at the end of the corridor,” Tanner said, holding the bottle out at arm’s length, radiating infectious awkwardness like a lump of uranium, and words apparently stuck in his throat.

Q accepted the bottle and stood holding it in both hands. Tanner let his arms fall by his sides.

“Er,” said Q, gesturing with the bottle. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say, or what he was supposed to.

“I should,” Tanner said, making no motion to go or even to finish his thought.

“Er,” said Q a second time. “Would you care to ... join me in getting slightly tipsy in a cold basement bathroom?”

There was a party upstairs, he thought, as soon as the words were out. A party with lights and music and food and people and drink and all those other party things that were supposedly enjoyable and didn’t rub other people up the wrong way and make them feel itchy and ever so slightly violent. The proposal of splitting one bottle so that neither of them was even slightly drunk and neither of them spoke to anyone else was not going to appeal to anyone. The idea that he could, somehow, prevent Tanner from making polite contact with any of their mutual colleagues, however, gave Q a small, warm sense of power that was quite removed from the easily-obtained control over digital lives.

“Delighted,” Tanner said, with something that might or might not have been a smile, but which definitely wasn’t enthusiasm. He put his hands in his pockets – which bunched up his cheap suit and made him look like a small rugby player – and followed Q into the bathroom.

He’d never been in these specific ones before, but was relieved to find they were as anodyne and blue/grey/white as any other office conveniences in the country, replete with chemical bouquet and unworldly echoes. Q had originally intended to lock himself in a cubicle and fiddle with his oft-maligned phone, but now Tanner was here the idea of beckoning him into such a small space seemed unduly intimate.

“Shall I?” Tanner asked, gesturing with the bottle. Q couldn’t remember precisely when he’d taken it off him, but it was back in the man’s hands all the same.

“Well,” said Q, “that’s why we’re here.”

He was expecting a nerve-rattling _bang_ , but Tanner’s camouflage among the Old Boys’ Network had included perfecting the art of smooth champagne-opening.

“After you,” said Tanner, when smoke had stopped swirling out of the bottle.

Feeling more than a little ridiculous, Q tipped the heavy bottom of the bottle up, and his head back, and necked mid-range champagne like he was a teenager guzzling Strongbow in the park. It was, insofaras he could tell, good stuff. 

“This counts as my forced socialisation for the year,” Q informed Tanner, as he gave him the bottle. All the situation needed to be complete, Q thought, was for him to still be wearing a duffel coat (too used to the heat of Qatar at that age, still) and be about five minutes from being in a headlock that would culminate in needing a cap on his front incisor after he misjudged badly just how welcome his advances were.

He watched Tanner swig champagne, a little intrigued by his apparent absence of neck. 

“Should I be flattered that you decided I should be the recipient of it?” Tanner asked, giving him the bottle back, and pointedly not touching his hand.

Q thought about this. “You’re not as annoying as Harris and Meade,” he said, at last.

“I shall treasure that,” Tanner said rather dryly, while Q drank. “You threw a terabyte external hard drive at Meade.”

Q started to ask how he knew that, and remembered the file. The complaint might not have made it to disciplinary, but it seemed Meade’s feelings, if not his face, had been sufficiently hurt to drive him into filling out paperwork.

“You, uh,” said Q, immediately running out of small talk. He watched Tanner drink again, uneasy and regretting his invitation a little, and cast around for anything he could say that didn’t sound intrusive or painfully stupid. “Do _your_ friends call you Henry?” was his last resort, clutching at the only thing he could be sure they had in common that wasn’t work, a Y-chromosome, or a melanin defect.

Tanner shook his head, handed Q the bottle, and said, “They call me Harry,” with some deliberation. “Neil calls _everyone_ Harry,” he added, “He had a head injury and he can’t remember names any more.”

Q drank, because he had no idea how to answer this, or who Neil was, and he had a vague feeling that he ought to counter with something similar, and couldn’t think of anything.

“Do _yours_?” Tanner said, when Q had finished.

At this, Q wished he retained the bottle, but Tanner was already holding it.

“Right,” he said, instead. “Either I tell you that I don’t have any friends, which you probably already know, or I admit that they call me Q, because they’re all people I work with, and that’s if you make the definition of friendship ‘people who play MMPORGS with you’.”

Tanner gave him the bottle back with a small smile. “And you don’t like ‘Henry’.”

“I didn’t say—“

“But you don’t.”

Q shrugged. “It’s a family name,” he said, although this explained nothing of his dislike for it whatsoever.

“So’s mine, after a fashion,” said Tanner, extending his hand for the bottle. At this rate, Q thought, it would be gone too quickly, and neither of them would escape the horrid social desert in its wake.

“After, er,” Q offered, just about remembering to put a questioning inflection on the end at the last minute.

Tanner didn’t answer him for a minute, even after he’d taken the Jouet from his lips. He just held the bottle in both hands, and frowned at the floor. Q began to wonder if perhaps he just hadn’t heard the question.

“I’m named for my father,” Tanner said, at last, “and the man my mother was married to when I was born was called Stewart.” 

A few hundred sentences of context thronged about them, unspoken.

“Ah,” Q said, reaching for the bottle. Tanner relinquished it. “That sounds unfortunate.”

“Could be worse,” Tanner said, as Q took his turn. He sounded as if he was forcing the stoicism on like a straitjacket. “You know what happened to Bond’s.”

“We can’t all be _that_ spectacularly tragic,” said Q, who probably knew more about 007’s childhood than the man himself did. Whatever else one could say for various corporate-terrorist organisations around the world – namely Quantum – they kept meticulous records on their foes with terrible security, and Q took directives like ‘find out what they have on Bond’ very seriously.

“Or that rich,” said Tanner quietly. Q drank, because anything else his mouth wanted to do was stupid and unhelpful. He had no idea how fresh the wounds were, or what to do about them. Poverty and adultery were a long way off his personal experience: his father had been too busy for him and his mother too depressed, but he was quite sure he’d been too preoccupied to care very much. They’d certainly never been short of money.

“You know what the field agents talk about, at these parties?” Tanner said, suddenly.

Q, whose mouth was still full, only shrugged.

“Aside from some ungentlemanly comparison of conquests,” said Tanner, unreadable again, “it’s telling tales of war wounds. This scar came from so-and-so. I got this one doing such-and-such.” He gave a thin smile at nothing in particular. “There’s a certain amount of overlap.”

“That sounds like small boys,” Q said, and he offered the bottle back without prompting.

“A certain _type_ of small boy,” said Tanner, taking it, and not drinking from it. “Have you even been in a fight?”

“Are they still fights if I never got the chance to land a punch?” Q asked, more sarcastically than he’d intended. “Because if so, I’ve been in nearly triple figures.”

“You’d fit right in upstairs.” Tanner took another swig. “You and Bond can talk shop.”

Without thinking, Q said, “If Eve lets him off the lead.”

Tanner gave him the bottle back so abruptly that it was less giving and more shoving, and straightened his tie. He said, “I have to get back up there. Enjoy your champagne.” He pulled his shirt cuffs down, and added, by way of a parting shot as he left, “And your solitude.”

* * *

Spring resolutely failed to come in like a lion. By March the frost was still tripping Q on his way in to work, and snow hiccupped out of the sky every second week, usually over his glasses and into the collar of his coat.

“It would make sense if this was Manhattan,” he complained, when Harris had tracked slush through the main offices. “But this is taking the piss. I can’t get anything done if I have to wait ten minutes every morning for my fingers to warm up.”

“You’ve started going _home_ to sleep,” Oladipo pointed out, untying the straps of his hat but not taking it off. “And there the rot set in. Lazy, lazy Q.”

Q scowled at him. “You’re not funny.”

“I’m fucking hilarious,” Oladipo assured him. “You have no sense of humour.”

Q made himself a cup of tea, and came to his desk to find a yellow post-it note stuck to the monitor again. This time there was no capital-lettered and pointed insistence that he apologise (which was just as well as he _really_ couldn’t remember doing anything that warranted it this time), only a note – in the same handwriting – which read:

“Happy Birthday.”

“Oh,” said Q, who’d lost track of March somewhat.

“What?” Meade asked, getting ready to dodge.

“It’s my birthday,” Q said, gently peeling the post-it off and putting it into his coat pocket.

Meade had been working for Q Branch for long enough to know not to ask how on earth someone forgot their own birthday, or to wish him a happy birthday himself. He only said: “Congratulations, on year closer to being able to buy your own drinks—“ despite being, by his birth certificate, three years _younger_ than Q.

Correcting one of Harris’s unnoticed errors ate up most of the day. Q was far from above finding Harris, rubbing his nose in his mistake in front of all his colleagues, and standing over him and condescendingly explaining exactly what he needed to do to fix it. For good measure he added a lengthy screed about what potential implications it would have for the service at large, and by the time Harris had finished mopping up after his cock-up, he was red-cheeked (more than normal: Harris had a complexion like a slapped arse) and more or less fuming at the endless humiliation.

“Do you have to be like that about it?” Harris complained, when Q asked him to try to think of the wasted man hours as potential dead sleeper agents, or ‘missing money, if that’s where your priorities lie’.

“Do _you_ have to let everyone down with easily-avoided fuck ups?” Q countered, sipping tea. He’d made it half-way through barracking Harris with the intention of slurping it sarcastically, and he wasn’t about to be distracted from this.

“Well,” Harris sighed, wiping his face of the unseemly sweat that had appeared on it. “I think you enjoy it.”

Taken aback a little, Q laughed out loud, set his tea down, and sneered, “No, Harris, you’re really not my type.”

“Yeah, we all know what your type is,” he muttered, and for a blurry moment Q was fourteen, fifteen, seventeen, and twenty-one, having his teeth and various other features punched in for being too obvious or just stubbornly refusing to hide it at all. He shook off the sensation: ‘u fag’ was an unused term of remonstration on his WoW raiding parties for a good reason: it was hardly a secret. It wasn’t so much that he was ‘out’ as that he’d never really been _in_.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to enlighten me,” Q said, picking up his tea again. “Maybe you can set me up with someone.”

Harris pulled a face. “Fuck off, Henry, I wouldn’t put my friends near your crotch if they begged me to.” He closed down his laptop, and said with the air of someone delivering a killing blow, “And Bond wouldn’t look twice at you even if he wasn’t being pussywhipped by that secretary, so you might as well stop wanking over him.”

Q finished his tea, said, “Don’t pretend you don’t know Eve’s name,” and left Harris to it. Hurling things in frustration was a display he reserved for frustrating stupidity: spite was just spite. He’d heard worse. And it wasn’t as if Harris really _needed_ to be able to ever apply for a job where he had to have a CRB check, or be able to live somewhere without concerned locals finding him on the sex offenders register, or to not be woken up in the middle of the night every night for the next month by police raids...

He went back to his interrupted work, and barely looked up until eight.

“I’m told you’re in a horrendous mood and that I should approach you with caution,” Tanner said, from the doorway. 

“Harris is being a crybaby because I demonstrated how much of a moron he is,” Q said, without turning around, or stopping work. He’d run out of tea, which hadn’t bothered him until now. Somewhere behind him, Tanner closed the door. “I got your... note.”

“I didn’t think you were the type to appreciate a card.”

“You thought right,” said Q, reaching for his mug, and nearly knocking it off the table in his reluctance to stop staring at the screen. 

“I was going to ask if you wanted to find another bathroom to drink in, given your lack of fondness for pubs,” said Tanner, and Q could _hear_ the small-mouthed smile in his voice. “But I suspected you didn’t fancy that, either.”

Q almost got his little finger around the handle of his cup, but was forced to relinquish it when he realised he was going to need two hands to type with if he wanted to finish any time before midnight. “What are you here for, then?”

Tanner said, “I came to ask if you wanted me to make you a cup of tea, actually.”

Despite it being the last thing he had intended to do, Q stopped typing altogether and said, or rather blurted, somewhat against his will, “Thank you.”

Tanner reached past him and picked up the Scrabble mug. “You’re welcome.” He was temporarily close enough that Q could feel the change in temperature that accompanied another person’s body heat. Normally that kind of proximity made him angry and anxious, and frequently – given the hygiene of the people he worked with – slightly bilious, but this brief intrusion made something like a stomach gurgle go off within him. It was like wafting the smell of bacon in front of a starving man.

This undid all the good of having someone else go and make tea for him: he was momentarily unable to focus on his work, and stared unseeing at the monitor while his brain stepped out for a breather and left him confronted with the hard-to-subdue creature that was his libido. Q was quite sure most people – who weren’t familiar enough with him to insult his taste repeatedly – thought he was a sexless automaton designed for the purpose of making computers do things, and he preferred it that way. 

He wrestled the physical nuisance back down in his mind, and went back to work.

“Mind your hand,” said Tanner, putting the tea down within reach but out of easy knocking distance. It was a calculation Q had never been able to perfect, but he supposed that years of wordlessly putting coffee within reach of M while she was taking someone to pieces with the sharp edges of her tongue had trained Tanner in the art.

“Is this standard birthday celebration,” Q asked, forgetting to make it sound like a question. He waited until Tanner withdrew before groping for the cup. There was some prickling aftershock in his flat, hollow stomach which told him it would be a bad idea to make accidental contact, whether eye or physical, at this moment.

“No,” Tanner snorted. “If you ever read your emails you’d notice that when everyone else gets older they go to the pub.”

“That’s not an enormous incentive to read my emails,” Q said, “what with the pub being on my list next to karaoke and dancing, under ‘inexplicable things everyone else professes to like when they’re clearly completely unbearable’.”

“Pubs, karaoke, dancing, parties, coffee,” Tanner said. Q tried to check on his position in the room by looking in the monitor, but it was an anti-glare screen and matte as a sheet of paper, which until now had been perfect. “What’s your angle on cricket?”

“Sport,” Q said, surprised this even needed to be asked. “ _Sport_. Look at me.”

“Ballet,” Tanner suggested.

Q stopped typing for a moment, narrowed his eyes, and said, “I’d be shocked and stunned but _you’ve read my file_.”

“It’s not in your file,” Tanner said. “And it’s not in mine either. No one cares about support staff, remember?”

Q poked at the keyboard, and tried to make it look as if he was scrolling through the screen of code rather than what he was actually doing, which was suffering from a small internal meltdown and a mounting sense of horrified confusion. “Lucky guess?” he said, at last.

“No,” said Tanner, “I asked people.” He left the ‘like normal people do when they want to find something out’ hanging in the air like the stench of judgement on Q’s social skills. It at least explained why Harris thought he was an expert on Q’s ‘type’ all of a sudden. No one in their right mind ever believed Tanner was asking for things for _himself_. Champagne. Information.

After a while, Q realised that if he kept poking the keyboard he was going to cause problems for himself, and he dragged his hands away from it, and wrapped them around the cup of Earl Gray instead. He held it under his nose, sniffed it for a minute, and said, “If I ask _why_ , am I going to regret it?”

He looked up in time to see Tanner shrug. “Only you know that.”

Q nodded to himself, and sipped tea. It was not entirely dissimilar to pouring petrol into an engine. “I shan’t, then.”

“Up to you,” Tanner said. He was still wearing his suit. Q wondered if he changed out of the things to go home, or if the hoodie had been an aberration, a one-off. It had a peculiarly naked quality to it in his memory, a kind of eerie window into a world where people weren’t just their jobs or the information he was supposed to retrieve about them, but living breathing beings with thoughts and feelings and, in all probability, fears.

“It’s late,” Q said, still thinking about Tanner’s choice of clothes. Cheap suits, which he was almost sure he hadn’t worn under M. Mallory was either underpaying him – Q made a mental note to check his accounts, in the same way he’d made a mental note to check his own again after the tagging incident – or he’d just given up pretending to be one of the posh boys. Q thought it was probably for the best. Pretending was for the field agents, and for the office hours. No point in doing it when you didn’t have to.

“You’re right,” said Tanner, shifting his weight.

For a moment Tanner looked at him with the kind of level gaze and twitching jaw, flaring nostrils, and pink tint in his cheeks that made Q wonder if he was about to be in a fight, for reasons he couldn’t begin to fathom. But it passed, and Q looked at the monitor again, rattled, as Tanner moved for the door.

“Thank you for, er,” Q said, almost under his breath.

“Happy. Sorry. Never mind,” Tanner said, and Q heard the door open. “Birthday. I mean. Good night.”

In the marked silence after he left, Q could hear the fans of various computers more loudly than he had before. They dragged at his nerves, rather than soothing them as they usually did, and he found himself incapable of concentrating at all. Even finishing his tea didn’t help: he was into the dregs at the bottom of the cup before he realised that he’d been able to smell bergamot when Tanner reached for the empty cup in the first place.

“Ballet,” he muttered to himself. He wouldn’t have guessed it of Tanner, any more than he supposed Tanner would have _guessed_ it of him. He wondered what the attraction was there: he’d always found something soothing in watching exceptional physical discipline like that, the way they overcame the obvious pain involved and transformed themselves into delicately-balanced, smooth-flowing machines.

There was no use. He couldn’t concentrate. Might as well go home and sleep. Or see if going home rekindled the desire to work. 

Q picked his coat up off the top of Meade’s desk, and began putting computers into hibernation.

Going home did nothing to rekindle his desire to work: he prowled around his flat, unbalanced by being home before midnight, and noticing too many things about the place that had been comfortably escaping his notice until now. The TV – why did he even have a TV? – was at a weird angle. His washing machine had dust under the door handle. His bed covers didn’t match. There was no post on the doormat.

There was no _reason_ for there to be any post on the doormat, and yet the absence of any envelope at all needled at him. 

“No,” Q said to the empty flat, and turned all the lights off.

The streetlights came through the blinds and made a striped mess on the bare wall, as well as over part of Q’s face. He twisted the handle until the slats closed, and sat on his bed, intending to throw himself at sleep and see if it could be persuaded to stick, this early in an evening. He hadn’t been keeping to his usual schedule of _work until brain won’t go any more_ , recently, and there was a good chance he’d even developed something that looked like a sleep pattern.

“ _No_ ,” Q said, somewhat louder, and inside of taking any of his clothes off or going to the bathroom, he fell backwards over the length of the single bed and lay staring at the ceiling in the dark.

Someone in the street outside started honking their horn: someone in the houses adjacent opened a window and shouted at them to stop being a dick.

“GOD,” Q said, so loudly it was almost a shout, and rolled onto his face with his arms trapped underneath him. 

He didn’t bother to ask himself what the matter was with him: it was the same old tiresome story. The body wanted, and couldn’t have. Even when you got hold of someone there was little likelihood they’d accept what you wanted to do to them. Sex, maybe: plenty of people would tolerate him _fucking_ them, if they were drunk enough or bored enough. The rest was out of the question.

The honking horn was joined by a dog setting up a monotonous bark that it no doubt intended to keep up all night.

“No,” Q said, and pulled his pillow over his head.

Around five in the morning he decided he should give up on sleep, and went for a shower.

He was in the middle of scrubbing more angrily at his pathetic outcropping of chest hair than he really should have, when the thought wandered into his head and refused to budge: _you know the problem with Bond is that he’s used to it._

Q put the soap back in the tray and gave his penis a cursory annoyed examination, as if the cause of the problem would be there under his foreskin.

_He takes a pummelling every time he goes out. Eve probably has him—_

Q slammed the gates shut hard on the rest of the thought. He’d dedicated enough five in the mornings to what Eve did or did not do to Bond, and felt disgusted enough at himself for gradually slipping himself into her shoes in those thoughts, until he had his dick in his hand and his lip in his teeth. Yes, she probably did do things to Bond that would leave welts. It didn’t make any difference, he told himself. _He_ wasn’t leaving welts.

The other problem with Bond was that, disregarding his obvious and untameable desire to be subjugated and hurt, there wasn’t anything about him that Q found actually attractive. He was too firm. One could imagine things bounced off him. He was a suit of armour with nothing inside.

Q leaned on the wall of the shower and very cautiously let the thought run its course.

_Someone a bit softer, where each blow sinks in._

Q pulled his hand off his dick, said, “No, no, no,” and got out of the shower without turning it off.

* * *

While the year before his birthday had got away from him, the days and weeks after it dragged for Q in ways that made little sense. He finished one of his longer-term projects, and received fulsome if distracted praise for it from HQ, and begrudging but heartfelt noises of impressed envy from the rest of his team, which was worth infinitely more as they actually understood what he’d been trying to do and what made it difficult. Everyone else just assumed that if an information-system related probably was dropped in the general vicinity of Q for long enough, some form of magic would happen, and it would be solved.

Spring took a frustratingly long time to be sprung. Q could almost sympathise with the women he passed one Friday night, late on his way home, shivering at the bus stop in talismanic summer dresses as they defiantly challenged the weather to turn the fucking heating up. He’d never been fond of summer, but what felt like an endless freeze didn’t appear to be doing wonders for his mood or anyone else’s productivity.

He was thrown out of his post-project apathy by an email. He’d taken to checking them more often, and found that for the post part it was the same frustrating inanity and bureaucracy as either other form of memo, but with more pointless spam and misspellings. However, it had also allowed him to keep something approaching a track on the seasons of the Royal Opera House, and he was informed, while he was sifting aimlessly through his inbox and trying to regain some sense of purpose, that tickets were on sale for a new production of _La Fille Mal Gardee_. 

It wasn’t his favourite by a long stretch, and the plot, such as it was, was tedious and frothy. But the corps looked interesting, and for a moment Q thought about allocating a point in the future when he _wouldn’t_ be working. He considered buying a ticket.

“Meade, you ball of shit,” someone said, from the other side of the room.

He considered, very briefly, buying two tickets.

“It’s not even very good,” he muttered, and he closed the email tab entirely.

Despite having nothing but odds and ends to work on, he stayed in the office until long after everyone else had left (and as Oladipo was avoiding visiting relatives by pretending to have more work than he had, this was late), making more work for himself, and using up the loose-leaf tea someone had brought in as part of a well-intended mistake. 

His ramblings brought him warily back to his inbox. There was a second email from the Royal Opera House, and Q gritted his tea. “I don’t like _La Fille Mal Gardee_ ,” he said, moving to delete it.

_Two for One offer on early bookings_ the subject line said.

“You’re doing this on purpose,” Q told the computer, and by extension the Royal Opera House marketing team.

He opened the email. The list of dates was suitably far in advance – two months at least – to allow him to change his mind, invite ... anyone he felt like inviting ... or just throw the tickets up for grabs to MI6 as a whole. There was time enough to ... to ... _to worm out of it_ , thought the part of his brain which had observed the similarities between Bond and an empty suit of armour.

“I’m too busy,” Q said, slurping his tea in the fan-noisy office, locked in a battle of wills with a promotional email sent to absolutely everyone on the mailing list. He didn’t remember signing up for the Royal Opera House mailing list, but it seemed like one of those things people signed you up for when you bought things from them. 

Two months was two months. Q drummed his fingers on his Scrabble mug, and stared at the booking link. There was a no-fee cancellation. There was the likelihood that he could, without any trouble at all, go in and erase the booking and give himself a refund at any moment between now and then. It was unethical, and he usually blanched at interfering with the finances of arts institutions beyond occasionally, and idly, giving them donations from anyone who had been particularly snotty about them in a newspaper column. But he could do that.

“He probably doesn’t want to go,” Q said, finishing his tea. He put the mug down by the keyboard, and folded up at the waist to bang his forehead on the edge of the desk. He hadn’t been intending to pin down a possible recipient for a ticket even in the recesses of his own mind, but now the sentence was past his teeth he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t thought it. Tanner’s round, composed face came to mind at once.

_Two for one offer on early bookings_ , said the email subject, brightly. The marketing copy blethered amiably about the history of the ballet, the new choreographer (Sam Day, former member of the corps for Matthew Bourne’s _Swan Lake_ , who had apparently – Q looked him up as much as a distraction for his hands as for his mind – dabbled in _shipbuilding_ in Falmouth before returning to dance), the corps, the principals, the environs of the Royal Opera House, and the excellent reviews.

About ten minutes after he’d taken out his card and paid for the one-ticket-that-involved-booking-two-seats (in the dress circle, neither too flashy in the stalls nor too cheap in the Gods), Q had a terrible late-night idea of the sort that friends existed to prevent one from acting on.

_He has an online calendar,_ Q thought. _Well, a calendar that’s on his computer which is accessible to me like every other computer in MI6. He checks the damn thing regularly. I could just. Edit this in. As a future appointment. And not have to ask him at all._

And not risk him saying no.

Or yes.

Q made himself another cup of tea, to put off the inevitable a little longer. While the pot was steeping – people needed to stop assuming that his snobbery outweighed his impatience, and just buy him bloody teabags, even the most elevated brands did their blends in bags now – he let his mind wander onto the idea of asking, like a person, and taking the consequences, like a grown-up. Tanner probably wouldn’t deck him. They were all too old for that now, and with the exception of Q, mostly too mature.

It ought to be simple. “I like ballet, you like ballet,” Q said to the empty office. It sounded pathetic. “I have a spare ticket –“ Yes good. Not like he’d bought it with Tanner in mind. Slightly less pathetic. “I have a spare ticket, I was wondering if.”

Q poured himself a cup of tea. Why was he even considering this stupid course of action? Because Tanner had a strong neck but a soft face that didn’t lend itself to dramatic expressions? Because his pupils dilated when he made eye contact? Because he’d worn a t-shirt once and left Q unpleasantly obsessed with what might be under it?

He stared into his tea. Because he put milk and three sugars in what was possibly really Earl Grey? Because he wore suits from Primark and liked ballet and abandoned, without complaint, swank parties full of people he apparently liked, so that he could stand in a basement with Q and watch the latter fail to converse?

“Oh for goodness sake,” Q said, sipping too-hot tea and burning himself. “Henry Horace Symmonds, for a very clever man you really can be fucking stupid.”

He broke into Tanner’s calendar, added the date of the performance, the time, and the location, and failed to in any way include who the appointment was _with_.

* * *

It was supposed to be a point of policy that no one at MI6 really acknowledged their colleagues in public, but the directive was broken so often that even the top brass had accepted that it was more of an ideological destination than a realistic rule. So it wasn’t a great _surprise_ for Q when he ran into Eve in Sainsburys, even if he wasn’t entirely comfortable with it.

“Henry—“ she tapped him on the forearm to get his attention.

“Oh. Hello,” said Q, aware that she could hardly call him Q in public but wishing he’d thought to make up some other name for people to use, or at least asked them to use his surname. 

“Hello to you too. How’re you keeping?” She had ten packets of assorted biscuits in her basket, which struck Q as eccentric until he realised she’d probably been shanghaied into restocking the anteroom for visitors.

“Busy, mostly,” Q said, automatically. “Um. How are you?”

“Livid,” Eve said, cheerfully. “We’ve got mice all over the top floor and _someone_ decided it’s _my_ job to put traps out, because Rentokil can’t be trusted around confidential information.”

 

“Peanut butter,” Q said, without thinking.

“Oh, good,” Eve said. “I’ll get some now.” She gave him a more penetrating smile, and said, “Good luck.”

“What?” said Q, but she’d already gone. “Thank you, but what?”

Eve didn’t turn back, and he bought his lunch in a state of muted inner turmoil, trying not to allow paranoia to take over. He wasn’t _aware_ of being scheduled for a performance review, and he usually remembered when those were due to take place.

The cashiers were so familiar with his buying habits that this one – Q squinted at her name-badge – Areena, had already scanned the appropriate barcodes from her cheat sheet before he got to the till. Q looked at his box of Twinings (rubbish, but available from a small supermarket), egg sandwich, and replacement toilet paper, and wondered if perhaps he should experiment with deviation from the rut he was wearing for himself.

Ten yards out of Sainsburys it occurred to him to wonder what Eve was doing in Westminster when she worked in Vauxhall. 

“Good luck,” he mused, aloud. “What?”

He was no closer to figuring it out after a day of distracted tugging at the incident in his mind, and several covert checks of every schedule he could think of, including other people’s. The only pertinent thing anywhere was _La Fille Mal Gardee_ , tomorrow night.

“Oh hell,” Q said, closing everything in favour of hiding in the toilets. He couldn’t delete the bloody thing from the calendar _now_ , Tanner was sure to have noticed it. 

He considered taking the next day off sick and therefore signalling that he wasn’t going to be around in the evening either, which he acknowledge was too drastic as soon as he’d had the thought. Q didn’t believe in taking time off for sickness, and berated his team for letting trifling matters like pneumonia keep them from their stations.

_What am I supposed to wear?_

_What if he doesn’t show up_

_What if he **does**?_

“Fuck,” said Q into his hands. The illusion of solitude provided by the cubicle was at least soothing: he could just stay in here, possibly forever, and never have to even try to look anyone in the eye again. “Fuck.”

“Something wrong?” Oladipo asked from outside. Q froze. It was a breach of fundamental bathroom etiquette to talk to a man in a stall, he was pretty sure of that.

Q wracked his brain for a good excuse, and came up tongue-tied and confused.

A shower of toilet paper fell down onto him from over the door.

“Thank you,” Q muttered, and in his relief at not having to answer he sounded almost sincere. He heard Oladipo laughing at him, and the bathroom door closed.

* * *

The sun rose on a sparkling, hot morning in late May. Pigeons burped and yelled in the leafy trees: aeroplanes scarred the naked blue skies with white vapour trails, and children called each other cunts and gays in carefree piping voices on their way to school, and Q tried on every item of clothing he owned.

“Shit,” Q said, once he’d tried on every last shirt, every single pair of trousers, and every one of a limited range of cardigans and/or sleeveless jumpers. “Shit, fuck.”

He sat down on the floor by his wardrobe, still in socks and pants, and laid his forehead against the wood. It was bin day – he could hear the rattles and the idling engine, and the unwelcome indistinct chorus of “Call Me Maybe” from an assortment of accents, all male. Everyone else in the world seemed to be in a fantastic mood.

Q scrabbled for his phone, noted that he was going to be late, and sat cross-legged on the carpet, searching the limitless font of stupidity available on the publicly-accessible internet with the term “what the fuck do I wear on a date when I don’t know if it’s actually a date”.

He took the sum total of the unhelpful responses, considered how annoyed they made him, and selected a dark red shirt he’d only worn once. It was a bad omen, he thought, if he believed in them. The red shirt had been for a disastrous assignation: it was meant to identify him to someone who’d never seen his face, and whose face Q frankly hadn’t wanted to see again afterward.

“You’re already late,” Q told himself, and he got dressed in a frenzy, flinging a cardigan on over the top in the hope of averting everyone’s interest in why he’d stepped into eye-catching oxblood.

By the time he got to Whitehall he was an hour late, and far too hot. Q came into the office with burning cheeks and no breakfast, told Harris to swallow a bag of batteries in answer to his incredulous expression, and made a bee-line for the kettle.

“Got something nice planned for this evening, then?” Gulheed asked. _She_ was wearing a t-shirt from a games convention or conference three years previously that Q was quite sure she hadn’t actually been to, and she had a mouthful of prawn cocktail crisps. The smell of artificial flavouring was overpowering, and Q’s stomach couldn’t decide whether it was nauseated or hungry.

“Define nice,” said Q, unable to think of a lie on an empty stomach.

“Dunno,” said Gulheed. “Looks like you’re trying to get laid.” She sucked the crisp dust off her fingers, and waved saliva-wet digits at the shirt, only half-hidden under a grey cardigan. “My mum always said that was the colour of wanton women.”

Q rolled his eyes.

“Good for you,” Gulheed said, wrinkling her nose. “Have a wanton evening. About time.”

“I won’t.” Q threw a tea bag irritably into his cup. “Don’t you have a pile of work the size of a middling horse that you’re meant to be doing?”

She made a sour face at him, and gave him the finger for good measure. “Just trying to wish you a happy night’s dick-hunting, you grumpy git.”

“Hrm,” said Q, pushing the teabag around with a spoon that probably wasn’t as clean as it ought to have been. “Guess who is going to be reallocated to the H5X project _with Meade_ today.”

“You petty tyrant,” Gulheed said, leaving him alone with his tea.

Q looked down at his shirt. He’d tucked it in for wearing under a cardigan, but now it looked entirely too formal. This wasn’t the kind of occasion that called for that. 

He put his tea down and slowly untucked his shirt.

Five minutes later he tucked it back in again, and ten minutes after that he pulled it out.

Around lunchtime, Harris asked him if he was having a breakdown.

“You’ve been doing the shirt-tail hokey-cokey all morning,” he said, radiating an even mix of concern and ill-hidden mockery. “Seriously, _have_ you gone wrong upstairs or is it an excuse to have a crafty itch at your balls?”

“Shut up,” said Q, covering the urge to tell Harris that the verb he wanted was ‘scratch’, not ‘itch’. “Or I will put you on H5X for the remainder of the week.”

By official clocking-out time, Q had tucked and untucked his shirt so many times that one of the lower buttons came off, and threatened almost everyone on his team with H5X, even if he couldn’t threaten Meade with having to work alongside _himself_. No one ever left at clocking-out time, but Q realised if he wanted to get to the Royal Opera House on time he was going to have to.

He was at the door when he heard Gulheed tell someone, very loudly and with the intention of being overheard, “I told you so.”

“H5X,” Q shouted, closing the door behind him. H5X had vexed him when he took over the role of Quartermaster and Head of Technical Operations, until he realised that the boring and potentially impossible – but theoretically _incredibly useful_ \- operator worked very well as a punishment. No one could claim it was wasting their time because it of the fundamental value it had to the service if anyone could get it to work. It was difficult, but not in a way that enthralled anyone, and he knew from experience that it made one feel stupid and frustrated when no amount of chipping away at it helped, or appeared to change anything at all. 

The team, or the parts of it with an imagination and the appropriate cultural touchstones, called it alternately the Sisyphean Operation and The Augean Program. 

The evening was excessively warm and bright, the sun still above the rooftops, as he made street level. Q stood for a moment, wrestling himself out of his cardigan and untucking – hopefully for the last time tonight – his shirt. He took off for the Royal Opera House in one of the two gaits he possessed: there was The Drift, for when he was trying to unravel something tricky in his mind and didn’t care about nearly being hit by cars, and then there was this, the route-march, for when there were distances to cover and people in his way.

The people in his way were the worst kind of that subtype of people: sweaty London tourists shambling along at the end of a day out, presenting blockades of ponderous pastel studded with day-glo hats that had to be fought around and through.

He made it to Covent Garden at something approaching on time, blessed his past self for not deciding on a box-office pick up despite the postage costs, and found Henry Tanner standing outside the doors with a resigned expression.

Q slowed to a near halt. Tanner looked a little like he’d started getting changed into civvies and then decided against it, but closer examination revealed that the grey waistcoat and light blue shirt were actually better quality than what he’d taken to wearing to work, and the jeans looked new. Overall the combination should have made him look like a wanker – the outfit template had been the uniform of wankers at some point in the last decade – but on Tanner’s unassuming figure and matched up to his look of tired disappointment, it looked quite pleasant.

The disappointment was something of a nasty addition, until Q remembered that he was late-ish, and that Tanner had been standing there waiting.

_He waited_ , Q thought, surprised. He wondered if, in dallying, he could make Tanner wait longer.

His potentially unfair impulse was scuppered when Tanner spotted him, and said, “Oh it _was_ you.”

Which was when it occurred to Q that in all probability Tanner had also let the thought enter his head that someone was playing a trick on him. He reached into his pocket, and proffered a slightly damp ticket to Tanner without saying anything. His breath hadn’t quite caught up with his feet, and he thought it was unreasonable to expect someone who spent so much time glued to a computer screen to walk that quickly at such short notice.

Tanner took the ticket with a tight-lipped smile, and waved a hand abortively at the door, to suggest they should go inside.

The air-conditioning inside did a great deal to stop Q from feeling as if he was about to throw up his innards at any minute, but the feeling returned as soon as he was sitting in the dress circle, several seats from the exit, with an excellent view of the stage and no way of fleeing the scene.

They sat in silence for a moment, while everyone else muttered and rustled and the last few remaining laggards shuffled apologetically into their seats. Tanner said, “The choreographer went to school with a mate of mine.”

Q said, “I should probably have just asked.”

Tanner said, “We’re here now,” and shrugged.

In the stifling silence that followed, the house lights mercifully murdered the tension by dimming abruptly, leaving the orchestra to warm up in the darkness. In Q’s experience one got a little more leeway regarding the darkness, and the musicians tuned up, warmed up, and generally faffed with their instruments while people were still milling around, but he held his tongue and stared doggedly at the stage.

The tuning up went on for an intolerably long time. In the dark Q could hear and even feel people moving around him, and it had been so long since he’d last found himself in this position that he was tempted to get to his feet and hang over the railing for the sake of not being within nudging range for a while.

To distract himself from the proximity of all these bodies, Q blurted, “I never asked. How did you. Find yourself uh. Interested in.”

Tanner moved in his seat, but to Q’s relief didn’t begin the same series of unbearable fidgets that the rest of the audience seemed to be going through. He said, “I took lessons when I was twelve. Just for a year.”

“You took _lessons_ ,” Q repeated, too loudly.

“SHH,” said someone several rows back, and someone else giggled. Q fought the desire to point out that the fucking overture hadn’t even started and that they could fling themselves off the balcony if they had a problem.

He felt Tanner shrug beside him, and heard the man say in an exaggerated whisper – hopefully intended as a sarcastic remark on the oversensitive audience, “I fancied the teacher. You’ll be pleased to hear the feeling wasn’t mutual.”

“Pleased?” Q echoed.

“Well, I was _twelve_.”

In the face of his blind panic, churning insides, and deep and increasing hatred of the entire rest of the dress circle, Q began to giggle. He put his hand over his mouth, horrified, and found this just made him want to laugh more. 

“You?” Tanner asked, and there was something in his voice that made Q feel strange and untethered from himself, and he realised it was the sound of suppressed amusement.

His own desire to keep laughing drained away with the question. He hedged, as carefully as he could: “My mother was very keen on it.”

The rest of that, he thought, was unsuitable for a nice night out. _My mother watched videotapes of various Russia ballet companies until the tape broke and I watched them with her because I thought it would help,_ didn’t exactly work as a light-hearted conversational ice-breaker. Strange Soviet cartoons and ballet were all she’d left him.

Tanner, he presumed, was waiting for him to elaborate. Q stared at the curtains and willed the show to start.

“I need to go _now_ ,” said a much younger voice on the far side of Tanner, and the next thing Q knew Tanner had got to his feet to let past a child of indeterminate gender and an age probably too young to be there in the first place, and Q followed him, squeezing against the back of his seat.

Under normal circumstances Q might have been annoyed by the break in concentration, but in the wake of a half-finished answer it was a pleasant distraction. He settled back into his seat, and glanced at Tanner twice. Tanner was studying the orchestra pit without enthusiasm, but he’d apparently received loud and clear the message that the conversation was over.

Q was less happy about that than he might have been.

With perfect timing, the orchestra struck up the overture, and Q’s sense of relaxation at no longer having to try to talk was so profound that he could have sworn his bones were melting.

He wasn’t sure later where in the first act he was when it occurred to him to check whether or not Tanner was enjoying himself, but he was very sure of how clearly the image wedged itself into his mind afterwards. He turned to his left, just for a moment, and caught sight of Tanner’s face in the darkness, barely illuminated by the lights from the stage, and rendered nearly invisible by Q’s eyes used to the brighter lights they’d been staring into. He leant forwards in concentration, resting not his chin on his hands but his upper teeth on his thumbs, and his elbows on his knees, rapt and almost falling into the dance.

_No,_ Q thought, dragging his gaze back to the ballet. _That’s unfair_.

When the interval came he steeled himself for more conversation, but Tanner got to his feet with a wan smile and said, “Sorry, nature.” 

He didn’t return until the end of the interval, but he came back with two drinks, and an apologetic look.

“Queues,” he said. 

“Right,” said Q, who had spent the interval on his phone, trying to hunt down even one remotely useful piece of information on how to say something that wouldn’t make him sound socially dysfunctional. The internet had, as it always did, let him down badly.

“No Greenes,” Tanner added, nodding at the champagne. “I had to improvise.”

“Thanks,” said Q, as Tanner sat down. He tried to pretend to himself that he hadn’t been looking at the man’s arse. It was entirely too soon for that.

The second act began while Q was still trying to convince himself that he hadn’t been looking. He pointedly reassigned his attention to the ballet, and lost all his thoughts to the paradoxically rigid and liquid movements. They always seemed to target the part of his mind that liked to design elegant, complex machinery, and which enjoyed waking him up in the night with persistent moving diagrams of the smoothest, most organic-seeming clockwork. Q had dozens of files full of unfinished designs drawn from this well, and he couldn’t help wondering if he was subconsciously making a clockwork ballerina.

Tanner, in reaction to something Q’s brain had yet to process, shifted in his seat, and his knee touched Q’s. Q pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, dug what passed for his fingernails into the palms of his hands, pulled his knee away, and swung it back with a gentle tap.

Out of the very corner of his eye he saw Tanner’s infinitesimal smile, before he moved his leg away.

Q spent the remainder of the second half too hot and as tense as if someone had run an electric current through his whole body. When the applause – no ovation – came, and he joined in like an automaton, his mind switched briefly and abruptly into Russian.

He wasn’t sure if he was pleased to be freed of the stifling theatre or worried now that a perfect distraction had been removed. He got to his feet with the rest of the row, and only remembered his cardigan when Tanner gave it to him. 

“In the absence of a pub,” Tanner said, as the dress circle began staid shuffles toward the too-few exits, “there’s cake. If you want.”

“ _Cake_ ,” Q repeated, once again stuck on merely parroting key words.

Tanner said with what sounded even to Q like forced indifference, “It’s quieter. Just five seconds from here. They do tea.”

“Alright,” Q said. He wrapped his hands into the cardigan and closed his eyes twice on the stairs, choked with audience members, all of them talking.

Outside was dark, now (or as dark as it ever really got in central London), but still hot. Only the absence of a stuffy set of four walls made it feel cooler. He stood for a moment, taking in the air, mocking himself internally for thinking it was hot when he’d spent his childhood where it reached forty Celsius in the shade on most days. It was, at best, twenty-five now.

“This way,” Tanner said, walking in step with him rather than in front. The post-ballet crowds thinned out, and as Tanner promised the place he stopped at was fewer than a hundred yards, fewer than fifty from the Opera House door. On the far side of it Q could hear a string quartet.

It was tiny, in the manner of many London cafes, smaller than Q’s living room, with a few wooden tables and chairs arranged outside, and a bar of sorts around the windows inside, with high stools. 

The door had a sign reading ‘summer special late opening hours’. 

Some of the cakes had glitter on them. The woman who took Q’s slightly frosty order of “Just tea, no milk,” had painted her nails to look like pink leopard skin. It occurred to Q that if he ever stopped being irritated with Gulheed for long enough to feel compelled to be nice to her, he should tell her that this place existed. If there was one thing which was unquestionable about that bloody woman it was that she had a deep and committed relationship to eating.

The bar arrangement, Q thought as he perched awkwardly with his cardigan on his knees, was actually a good one. No need for eye-contact like this, and no risk of accidental touching. His knee itched gleefully, recalling the tap of another against it.

“Thank you,” said Tanner, setting Q’s tea in front of him. “For... not-quite inviting me. I’d meant to get a ticket, but you know. Money.”

Q opened his mouth to say something about pay reviews and the absurdity of administrative personnel wages, when he remembered what he’d seen of Tanner’s bank account, and closed it again. He put too-hot, over-stewed tea into his mouth instead.

Tanner said, “You _can_ ask. I know you saw.”

The hairs on the back of Q’s neck stood up and he tried to think of how to phrase the question without being rude _or_ making himself feel like he was in the dark (which he detested), _or_ acknowledging that he already knew more than he was meant to. Eventually Q said, “Younger or older?” and took a tactical tea sip.

“Fred’s the youngest,” Tanner said, and Q saw him grimace. “The ‘only legitimate heir’. And he _knows_ it.” The quotation marks hung heavy in Tanner’s voice. Q wasn’t certain, but he would have put it at over even odds that the originator of the phrase was Tanner Senior.

“Alright,” Q said, swallowing. “ _Why_? It’s ... a lot of money. Proportionately. Is he ... ill?”

Tanner snorted. “Only in the head.” He sighed. “It’s fuck-off money. Extortion. I pay for his flat, Phil pays for his car, Mum pays for his bills, and he leaves all of us alone.” Tanner stared into his tea, and said in a flat voice, “It would have been better for everyone if he was in prison, but Stewart won’t let that happen.”

Q gulped tea, scalding his throat, and wished he hadn’t asked. It didn’t seem a good topic for the evening, but he couldn’t think what _would_ be. “Sorry,” he said at last, and was startled to find that he meant it for once.

Tanner shrugged. They sat in silence until Q had pre-emptively finished his tea and, despite a nagging in his bladder, ordered a second one. When he returned with it, Tanner said – as if he’d been thinking about it for a long while:

“Do you mind if I ask you something?”

“Er,” said Q, who would ordinarily have said ‘how the hell am I supposed to know if I mind until you ask, I’m not bloody psychic, am I?’ and possibly also, ‘didn’t you _just_ ask me something?’ because hesitance in _other people_ drove him up the admittedly hypocritical wall. “Right?”

“Did you ... not exactly _ask_ ... me to come with you because there is anything about me you ... find attractive...” Tanner asked his cup of tea, and Q’s insides went liquid in a horrifying soup of panic and ugly hope. “Or because someone else turned you down?” At this part of the question – _that was **two** questions,_ Q thought, childish in his unhappiness, _that is unfair_ \- Tanner stopped interrogating his paper cup and looked up to catch Q’s eye and frown not so much at him as through him.

Q, who had unwisely just sipped his new tea, choked on it.

He spluttered for a little longer than he really needed to, went rather red in the face, and put the tea down slowly with an unsteady hand. “I just thought,” Q said, with care, “you liked ballet. And I do. And I probably wouldn’t have bothered going if it was just me.”

But Tanner, having worked up to this question, did not appear to be intent on stopping again. He quite visibly clenched his jaw, held on to his tea, and said to that cup of tea, “Only the general consensus seems to be that you’re infatuated with Bond.”

“Oh,” Q said, reeling somewhat. Part of his brain began coolly devising a list of who this ‘general consensus’ included and how much damage he could do to them before someone noticed. _Infatuated_. What a horrid, ugly, humiliating word. “No.” He realised, several hours too late to do anything about it, that his hair was probably a mess. “No. Bond has some very ... obvious ... characteristics that appeal. But nothing else about him does.”

To his surprise and bewilderment he saw Tanner’s face light up a very little, although he didn’t go so far as smiling. “So he’s convenient?”

“I _beg_ your pardon?” Q snapped, with the full force of some regrettably _equine_ indignation. 

Tanner did not seem set on backing down, and only said, “He’s convenient. A useful person to hang ... things you want on.”

“No,” said Q, his face burning.

Instead of answering him, Tanner undid his shirt cuffs and methodically rolled his sleeves up to mid forearm. For one stomach-churning moment Q wondered if he was going to have his face punched in a cake shop, but Tanner only laid his arms back on the bar top, palms up. 

Q was mesmerised: Tanner wasn’t wearing a watch, which was frankly uncharacteristic, and his skin was pale and almost featureless, barring the odd nick and a mole, flat as a shadow, peeping out of the shirt cotton. His wrists were thick, compact things, like his neck.

_But I have long hands,_ Q thought, and wished that he hadn’t.

“Obvious characteristics,” Tanner repeated at last. It was almost, but not quite, a question. 

After refraining from swallowing his own tongue, Q unstuck his mouth and said, “I think it’s your turn to guess, actually.”

Tanner looked at his own fingers. “I think you like having the upper hand.”

Q said, “It’s not familiar but yes, it is quite pleasant,” and tried to smile. 

“No,” Tanner said, still looking at his own hands. “That was my guess.” He paused. “You’re right, though,” Tanner added in a low voice. He seemed very slightly happier than he had before. 

“What?” Q asked, jerked out of his thoughts about the portions of his own hands and Tanner’s wrists.

“About Bond.”

Q was glad he’d not taken another tactical slurp, or he’d have choked on this one too. “How do you _know_?”

Tanner raised his eyebrows, and held Q’s incredulous gaze until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and looked down. “Apart from information like that being a necessary part of intelligence on field agent files,” he murmured. “She was very fond of _him_. He’s not just convenient. Or obvious.”

“Fond of him?” Q asked, dithering between two possible women but settling on one in the face of the past tense. “You mean...”

“I mean,” Tanner said, with such forced lightness that he sounded as if he was being slowly strangled, a simile Q instantly wished he could take back before its added to his already blood-filled cheeks, “ _and not me_.”

“Oh,” said Q, and in order to divert from the final, searingly naked, clause, he added, “I did wonder,” although he never had. Tanner’s tea was probably cold now, Q thought, and he wanted to tell him to drink it before it passed from lukewarm into icy, or go and get him another one. The lack of movement in Tanner’s hands was making his own fidget.

Tanner said, “Wonder no more. I heard them, once.” He pushed his tea a little way down the counter, to indicate he was finished with it. Q gripped his own more tightly. “I was working,” Tanner added, “not _trying_ to... just working. What else do I bloody do?”

With an odd sort of fascination that came as much from Tanner’s obvious discomfort as from his unintentional voyeurism and the things it had uncovered, Q said, “What did she _say_?” It felt like probing a wound, someone else’s wound, that they’d held out in front of him for some unknown reason.

“What he needed to hear,” Tanner said, with a tense shrug that could not have looked less like he didn’t care than if he had tattooed the words across his knotted shoulders.

“No,” Q said, surprised at himself, “I want to know now.”

“I don’t think I should tell you,” Tanner said. “I wasn’t meant to hear. You definitely weren’t.”

“I’m hardly going to _tell_ him, am I?” Q said, impatient. He drank his teeth to keep himself from leaning forwards, as if a confidence was being imparted. 

Tanner’s face, usually composed or at least inward-facing and unreadable, became temporarily mobile. Q barely noticed the string quartet move onto another piece of music outside: Tanner’s jaw muscles twitched. “She said: _you’re an empty vessel. Nothing. A weapon, an object. A means to an end. Functional. You’re barely a person. No one will mourn you, no one will love you._ ”

It struck Q as cruel – and he knew his own cruelty all too well, and his capacity for it – to take a man’s worst fears and hand them to him under those circumstances. He wondered if she’d hit him at the same time. “Ouch,” he said.

“It’s what he wanted,” Tanner said. He kept his hands and wrists very still almost as if – Q laughed bitterly at himself in his head – as if someone was holding them there.

“Why on earth would anyone _want_ to –“

“Can we _please_ ,” Tanner said, or rather almost snapped, “get off the subject. Of Bond. For a few minutes. If you really aren’t infatuated with him.”

It felt enough like a slap that Q pulled back and felt the words disappear from his head, back into wherever stored his thoughts. _Too far_. He stared at the side of Tanner’s head almost angrily, tracing the bulbous shape with his eyes, skating over small features set in a solid skull. He really did look as if he’d been designed for use in a siege.

“Ask me, then,” Tanner said.

“I really don’t like asking,” said Q, surprising himself with his own honesty. Asking things he needed to know to complete a task, demanding equipment that he needed, had never been a problem. But sounding as if he _didn’t already know_ something made his brain itch.

“Alright then,” Tanner said, “ _tell_ me what it is you want to know instead of trying to bore it out of the side of my head.”

“With regards to our... colleague and his ... superior,” Q said, delicately. “Did you ever offer...”

“I wasn’t what she wanted,” Tanner said, apparently resigned now to having too-fresh wounds repeatedly prodded. Q couldn’t work out why he was putting up with it with so little fight.

He said: “You know I’m not keen on being someone’s second choice, either.” The words were out before he’d really registered them, and he almost slapped his hand over his own mouth when he heard them in his ears. Only the cooling remnants of his tea in his hand stopped him.

“Point taken.” Tanner turned on his stool and gave Q the same kind of look Q had been playing over the side of his skull. Silence descended over them, and for a moment Q half-listened to the muttered conversation between two tired cake shop workers behind the tiny till: they were talking about Q and Tanner in whispers, and stopped when the silence went on for too long. 

Q moved his hand along the counter, slightly closer to Tanner’s upturned wrists, and thought better of it. There was a line in the sand there, which he felt he should probably refrain from crossing. Colleagues. The difficulty of actually making sentences out of vague, unwordy thoughts, and the necessity of it before he could reasonably expect to do any of the things which were stampeding through his mind like a collection of oversexed rugby players.

He watched Tanner’s Adam’s apple move in his throat as he swallowed, and after a moment Q edged his hand along the counter again, wondering for a moment if he could, possibly, just run away to a different country the minute he actually made contact. 

He withdrew his hand. This was an untenable plan. He wasn’t any good at this. Whatever ‘this’ encompassed, the entire inner circle of it was beyond the realms of his experience, or at least the realms of it that ended well. After today Q would entertain not even the merest thought about doing anything other than picking up horrible idiots from Grindr and wishing he was dead half-way through sex.

Nevertheless, Q’s hand moved on its own and hovered within a few inches of Tanner before he made a small sound of frustration and put it back on his own leg again. Q did however notice that rather than watching his _hand_ Tanner had been watching, without any expression, his face.

“Should I apologise?” Q said, eventually.

Tanner took a deep breath, and said in a very, very quiet voice, close to a whisper, “Just _do_ something. I’m going mad.”

Q was not entirely sure he’d actually heard this right, so he said, “It’s not that easy,” and hoped that he hadn’t just said something completely unconnected to the actual words that had come out of Tanner’s mouth.

“Just stop _fucking dithering_ ,” Tanner said with what sounded like genuine desperation, and pink cheeks. “Please.”

Had his hand been anywhere near his mouth, Q might even have bitten it in frustration at how hard it was to translate urges into words. He clenched his fist against his thigh, under the cover of his balled-up cardigan, and said, “Can I –“

“Whatever it is you want to do,” Tanner said, looking him in the eye hard enough that Q’s brain switched itself off for a moment, “please just do it.”

A jostling crowd of ‘it’ overwhelmed Q’s decision-making processes, and with no grace and a horrible jerk of his upper body, he dragged his hand out from under the cardigan and put it against the side of Tanner’s head, and part of his neck. His skin was cooler than Q’s, and a little damp with sweat, and felt unexpectedly soft. Q could feel his fingers digging in more deeply than he should have let them, and his thumb slipped in front of Tanner’s ear, and the whole of the gesture was ludicrously controlling for the first deliberate skin contact he’d ever made with the man.

Q tried to clear his throat, and made an ugly noise, and finally said, “Is that...” in something of a croak.

“I think they’re going to kiss now,” said one of the cake shop staff to her friend.

“Well either that or the thin one’s going to throw up,” said the other. “And you’re cleaning it up if he does.”

“It’s fine,” said Tanner. He might have sounded perfectly normal if his eyes weren’t half-closed and there wasn’t a very slight breathy rasp in his voice, both of which made Q want to do something unconscionably savage, either in the line of kissing or in the line of digging his thumbs into Tanner’s windpipe, or both at once.

Q rearranged his grip very slightly, and let his fingers dig in all the more into Tanner’s unresisting flesh. He tried to ignore, for the time being, the shameful elation it brought with it. “Does it hurt?”

Tanner smiled one of his smallest smiles. “Yes.”

Q flexed his fingers gently. “And that’s fine?” He found it much easier to ignore the women at the till now.

“Yes.”

“Can I ask,” Q said in a sudden rush, feeling his cheeks getting warmer. “This. You’re not. You’re holding it all in because we’re in public.” Despite saying _can I ask_ he failed to make it sound like a question, and even then, gesturing to Tanner’s serenely still face and minutely heaving chest with his free hand, he couldn’t make himself loosen his grip yet.

“Yes,” Tanner said, with a small quirk of the mouth. “I am.”

“So if I go somewhere else with you, there will be more... reaction.” Q lamely side-stepped the words _I’ll see how much you enjoy it_. He rubbed his thumb over the stubble in front of Tanner’s ear, and caught himself doing it. 

“Yes,” Tanner said again, placidly watching his face.

Q swallowed. “Can we go _now_?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Tanner said, twitching back a smile.

Disentangling his hand from Tanner’s face and throat was as difficult as if it was knotted there in tresses of matted hair. But Q eventually succeeded, to a not-very-quiet “ _Aw_ ” of disappointment from his unwanted audience at the tills – _their_ unwanted audience – and said, “Go on, then.”

He watched Tanner’s eyes refocus slowly, and something like an embarrassed smile, in which he finally caught a glimpse of teeth, stole up on Tanner’s face. “Well you know where I live,” he murmured. “Come on.”

This time he led the way, walking briskly in front, up the shallow hill to the tube station. Q could have caught up easily, but he lingered, watching the movement of fat-padded muscles under jeans, admiring Tanner’s back, and trying not to think too much about how he would now at least get to see the hidden territory that lay beneath shirt fabric. 

It wasn’t until they were at the ticket barriers that Q realised he’d left his cardigan in the cake shop, and he didn’t say anything about it. He could get another one. It didn’t matter. 

In the lift, which was full enough to give them an _excuse_ to stand almost touching each other, Tanner bumped his bare wrist quite casually against the back of Q’s hand, still staring ahead at the lift doors like everyone else. Q uncurled his fingers and closed them around the place hand met forearm with a hot lump of something like fierce delight forming in his throat: his fingers _were_ long enough to form a brief, bony manacle, and he fought to control his breath as the lift descended.

For the first time in a very long while he found the proximity of strangers irrelevant: he hardly even noticed their presence.

When the lift doors opened he released Tanner’s arm.

Having been parachuted into London at fourteen without much warning, to attend Imperial, and taken up residence as near to his campus as humanly possible, Q had never really bothered to explore the outer reaches of the tube map. As a consequence of this, he regarded even the border of zones two and three with the same Lovecraftian horror and Here Be Dragons attitude that most native Londoners held for Watford and Sidcup.

He was almost livid with repressed impatience by the time they alighted at Manor House, although he was confident at least that this didn’t show on his face.

“It’s a bit of a walk from here, sorry,” said Tanner, pointing down the road ahead.

“Might as well get moving, then,” Q said, nearly choking on the desire to grab his pointing hand and pin it to the bus shelter’s glass wall. Instead he matched feet with Tanner, and both of them walked as if they would rather have broken into a run. 

“What’s the fucking hurry?” hissed a drunk, sitting on the edge of the pavement with her feet in the road. “Something on fire? Eh? Something on fire? Fuck you.”

At the door to Tanner’s _block of flats_ , a depressed 1960s lump of brick and concrete which in one ugly architectural hiccup spoke of the toll the youngest Tanner brother took on Henr—on _this_ Tanner’s life, there was the fumbling dance of half-hidden door keys.

“Don’t say anything,” Tanner admonished, although Q hadn’t been planning to, “I know it’s a shithole.”

“I don’t care,” said Q, truthfully. At present the main thing that mattered about the residence of Mr Henry Tanner was that it had a door that locked and that they would be inside it soon. He couldn’t think of all the polite etiquette things one was supposed to say in the face of self-deprecation: he just didn’t care enough about where Tanner lived, right at this moment, to conjure them up.

At the stairs – “No lift,” Tanner said, taking them two at a time, “Keeps me in _a_ shape, at least.” – Q reached for Tanner’s wrist again, and Tanner slowed to let him take it. His pulse thundered under Q’s fingers, singing a rhythmic hymn of possibilities.

At the door to Tanner’s flat, which was not as grim as Q had feared, or as kicked-in as the outside of the building had led him to believe, Tanner tried to unlock the door without disturbing Q’s hand. It was a longer process than Q wanted it to be or than it needed to be, but he appreciated the effort so much that his impatience died away to mere background radiation.

And then they were inside. It was dark, apart from the guiding glow of various LEDs on devices Q couldn’t identify in the dark, and the room smelled of nothing very much, except the way it smelled of Tanner, and Q gathered up all his reserves of internal strength, and realised he was going to have to say it out loud:

“Bugger,” said Q, “I really, really need to pee.”

Tanner flipped the light on. “It’s on the left.” He didn’t seem surprised: Q supposed he _had_ just ploughed through multiple cups of tea, champagne, and no interval break for several hours.

The living room had clothes laid across every available surface.

“It’s on the left,” Tanner repeated, pointedly.

Q went, trying to process what he’d just seen, and was coaxing his bladder into life in front of a perfectly ordinary toilet bowl in a perfectly dull rented bathroom with perfectly ordinary and unremarkable toiletries balanced on the narrow rim of the shower, when it occurred to him that what it actually _meant_ was that Tanner had also been nervous. Another hoodie moment: other people felt things, and thought things, and feared things.

Q looked at himself in the mirror: his hair was catastrophic on a scale that defied understanding, and there were dents in his lower lip from his teeth. He hadn’t realised he’d been biting it so much. He’d rarely thought about his features, being more preoccupied with the glory of his intellect and the albatross that was his oft-lamented personality, but now he squinted at his reflection, adjusted his glasses, and said, “Be better-looking,” by way of talismanic request.

He washed his hands three times in nervousness, and went back into the living room.

Most of the clothes were now piled up on top of an ominously unstable white wire clothes dryer, and Tanner sat on the sofa – it looked familiar, and Q was pretty sure that it was both from IKEA and the one that he personally owned too – with his head in his hands.

“It’s been a long time,” Tanner said, in such a muffled voice that Q initially thought he’d said _**you’ve** been a long time_ , and had begun trying to come up with an excuse.

“Right—“ Q began, looking at his feet.

“I mean,” Tanner said, raising his head: Q heard the change in volume, looked up, and saw him pink-faced and a little despairing, “it’s been a long time and _I’m not properly prepared_.”

“Oh,” said Q, then, “ _Oh_ ,” as he made contact with Tanner’s meaning. He was oddly relieved, although he wasn’t sure it would be a good idea to mention that.

“I don’t suppose _you’ve_ got—“

Q shook his head. “As you said. It’s been a long time. I didn’t like to presume.”

“Fuck,” Tanner said, with some force.

“Tan—I can’t keep calling you Tanner,” Q began, feeling as if he’d walked in on someone else’s drama. The bare walls and the artificial light, the drawn curtains and the consequent feeling of being completely isolated from the rest of the world, also had the property of making him feel as if he was inside a dream or a TV show. The lateness of the hour didn’t help, and neither did his sobriety.

“You can call me whatever you want,” Tanner said, distracted. “I don’t mind. I don’t _care_. Fucking hell, you can call me _Bond_ if it helps.”

_Can I call you **mine**?_ Q didn’t quite say, and was grateful to his self-control for not letting it slip. He said, instead, “Henry. Just. Take your clothes off.”

Tanner smiled at him for a moment, and Q saw the tips of his teeth again. “Was that an order?”

“I think so.”

“I’m good with those,” Tanner said, unbuttoning his waistcoat. “Well, some of them more than others.”

Q watched him, quite without apparent self-consciousness, stand up and take off the waistcoat, and begin to undo his shirt. Tanner didn’t pause when it was undone, but removed it right away, and dropped it on the sofa with the waistcoat.

Naked to the waist, he presented a sort of subdued portrait of the human form: pale, undefined, not fat, not muscular, not thin, just soft and untanned. He had no tattoos, and no chest hair, presumably because of the old, stretched burn scar which ran across his torso, from just under his collar to just above his navel, and filled in the space between two very pink, small nipples. A corona of neutral-coloured hair encircled _them_ , but there wasn’t much unscarred hide for hair to spring from until the darker line from Tanner’s navel to the low-fallen waistband of his jeans.

Tanner caught him staring at it, looked down at the pink-and-white bare flesh, and said, “Yeah. Sorry.”

“It’s rather beautiful,” Q said, reaching out.

Tanner snorted. “First time anyone’s called it that.”

Q hesitated, his hand raised between them. “May I--?”

“Do whatever you like,” Tanner said, lifting his chin again. The change in his breathing was odd: Q wondered if, perhaps, that particular phrase was as enjoyable for Tanner to _say_ as it was for _him_ to hear.

“How?” Q asked, bridging the arms-length gap between them to run the very tips of his fingers over the smooth, ridged texture. Scars of any real mass never seemed to have any relation to ordinary skin, and Q had none of his own to stroke barring the one _inside_ his mouth. The position was unhelpful for exploration, and the memory attached to it was the opposite of erotic.

Tanner said, “I told you Fred belongs in prison,” in a bland, detached voice.

Q held his hand still over Tanner’s bare sternum, and examined his face rather than the scar for a moment. “You weren’t exaggerating.”

“I don’t,” said Tanner. “Kettle,” he added, with a bleak smile that strained the muscles in his cheeks, “boiling water. That’s how.”

“Hrm,” said Q, swallowing every other conflicting and confusing thought his mind vomited up at this information and at the pleasantly alien feel of scar tissue under his fingers, “I suppose after that getting the sharp edge of M’s tongue held no fears.”

“You’d be surprised,” said Tanner, unmoving. He closed his eyes.

“No, open them,” said Q, without thinking.

“If you tell me you like _them_ as well,” Tanner warned him, “I will ... laugh ... right in your face.”

Q walked his fingers up over the tight plains of scar tissue, and onto ordinary unmarked skin again, over Tanner’s collarbone, and into his throat. His neck wasn’t quite as thick as it looked in his suits, Q thought. He camouflaged himself, made himself seem more solid, and less vulnerable. Of course. 

He flattened his palm over Tanner’s Adam’s apple, and said, “I hope you know how much you can take. Not exactly brilliant at this.”

Tanner said, “More than you think I can.”

Q snorted. “Bravado doesn’t suit you.”

“What _does?_ ”

“Well,” said Q, “I don’t have a point of comparison but at the moment I thought bruises would.”

Tanner inhaled sharply, and Q listened as if it was music. It sounded as if someone had taken fear, and bred it intimately with anticipation, and a little disbelief. He was amused at himself, for a second, making out to himself that he was some great expert on the reactions of others when most of the time he only knew people were disappointed in him because they shouted it down the landing while throwing his clothes back at him. 

“How does that sound?” Q added, running the side of his thumb over the low stubble on Tanner’s throat. 

Tanner’s mouth twitched about, smiling and not-smiling, giving him once again the appearance of a rabbit. He said, after an unconscionably long period of this, “Pretty good.”

“So glad to have met with your approval,” said Q, with entirely insincere sarcasm. It was important the damn idea met with Tanner’s approval: there was no point in hurting someone who wasn’t enjoying being hurt: it might be satisfying on a petty, angry level, like the time Q had bitten someone’s face while they were trying to punch him in the stomach, but it did nothing for him sexually. Q had rather supposed that the point of this was for one, or possibly both of them, to get off. 

Q took his hand off Tanner’s throat, and felt him move forwards just a little as if chasing after the pressure of it. He raised it level with Tanner’s face, drew it back, and caught the man’s eye. He raised his eyebrows in a silent and hopefully clear question, and Tanner gave the most minute nod with the corners of his mouth turned up.

Q thought _what if he doesn't mean it_ , told himself to stop fannying around, and backhanded Tanner across the cheek hard enough to snap his head to one side.

As satisfying as it was to see someone not even attempt to defend himself, as much as the force of his own blow made Q's heart race far beyond the physical demands of exertion, it was Tanner's reaction that really grabbed his libido by the scruff of the neck, and shook it like a terrier with a rat.

Tanner made a small noise on impact, a _hrk_ of nothing in particular, and his mouth hung open. Both his cheeks, not just the one Q had hit, flushed red and hot, and when he opened his eyes they were bright and unfocussed.

"Again," Q said, meaning it as a question, but oddly out of breath.

"Please," said Tanner, also short of breath. The word tugged very insistently on Q's libido. He reached with his other hand, positioning Tanner's head by tilting his chin up; Tanner moved without any resistance, as easily as a well-lubricated piece of precision machinery.

Q raised his hand in threat: Tanner kept his eyes open, and on Q's face. The movement of his chest gave away his excitement, if not his fear. Q brought his knuckles against the same spot, hard, and with his hand on Tanner's chin he couldn't jerk his head away to follow the force of the blow.

The sound of bone striking bone filled Q's ears, and the surge of blood to Tanner's face filled his eyes, and a hot, rich feeling of being both immensely powerful and paradoxically _kind_ filled up his chest until it pressed at the inside of his skin.

"Another?" Q asked, and his voice was not steady at all, any more.

"I'll take whatever you give me," Tanner said, and his wasn't either. The words were so welcome that at first Q could hardly believe he'd heard them right.

"Say that again," he said, as much to reassure himself as because it sounded delirious. 

"I'll take anything you give me," said Tanner, his whole body relaxing: something about saying it pleased him, too. Q wished he'd thought to have him undress fully, so he could be sure of himself and its effects, but he didn't want to stop, now.

"Good," said Q, still holding his chin in place, his hand not yet raised. "Does it hurt?"

Tanner smiled at him. "Yes."

"Good." He raised his hand again, palm facing this time. He kept his hand on the warm skin, dug his thumb into Tanner's cheek, just above the lines of his mouth, and felt it give. Tanner didn't ask what he was doing or tell him to stop: he only stood and took it, breathing too hard, his arms loose and limp by his sides. _What can I do to you?_ he thought, but his head wasn't straight enough to let him ask. He swallowed, and pushed down with both hands.

"Get on your knees," he said.

Tanner went down like a felled tree, and gazed up at him unblinkingly. It felt as if someone had closed a hand around _Q's_ throat for a moment: he ran his thumb over Tanner's parted lips, and was rewarded with a shiver across all of the man's exposed skin.

He pulled his hand back, raised for another blow, and let himself breathe as hard and as raggedly as he wanted to. IT would be wrong to say that Tanner _smiled_ , exactly, but the corners of his mouth were up-turned, and the overriding expression of his strike-pinkened face was one of immense pleasure.

"Please," said Tanner, not waiting for the question this time.

Q backhanded him, striking downward, and felt now the answering tension in his groin. Nothing stirred yet, of course, but the possibility was there. He let the hand on Tanner's chin slip lower, until it lay cupping the upper reaches of his throat, and he could feel Tanner swallow under his palm. The thought of what else he might make him swallow came unbidden but inexorably to mind. 

With his hand on Tanner's throat, Q tilted his head further back until his eyes (watery and reddish with pupils full-blown) met Q's. Until his red, flared-nostril face and open mouth looked up, and his heavy breath and the absurd, loose expression on his face said obscene things in Q's mind.

Q struck him again, then again. His arms were beginning to shake with adrenaline: Tanner's thighs, too, shook from holding him up. Q ran his hand instead over Tanner's face, over his mouth, which was still wet, and felt the puff of air which accompanied a low, sub-vocal groan.

He pulled his arm back, and hit again. He should, Q reflected later, have kept some sort of count. Hitting the face was a good deal more dangerous than other places, and it was late and both of them were tired and it could have been easy, in hindsight, to knock Tanner out cold by accident.

At the _time_ , Q only thought what a wonderful accompaniment to the smack of knuckles on cheek Tanner's gentle, audible sighs and grunts were. 

At last his hand began to ache, and before he stopped being able to use it altogether, Q undid his fly in something of a feverish haste.

Tanner said nothing, only smiled dazedly in the general direction of Q's crotch.

Q ran the gradually-swelling back of his hand over the top of Tanner’s head, which had soft, short bristles over it and felt surprisingly nice against what was undoubtedly going to be a bruise on _him_. Tanner looked up at him, through – Q thought this was somewhat calculated, even at the time – his eyelashes. 

The request – the order – would be a simple one, if Q could untie his tongue enough to give it. He thought about the wording for a moment, which was somewhat hampered by his inability to form sentences even in his mind, and by the soreness in Q’s hand, which was no doubt mirrored by an answering sting and swelling in Tanner’s cheek. He turned his hand over and ran his palm down the back of Tanner’s head, to the join of his neck, to the place where a sharp blow could, he was assured, render someone abruptly unconscious.

He pulled Tanner’s head towards him.

Tanner raised his eyebrows.

“Oh fuck off,” Q muttered under his breath, trying to extract his cock without taking into account the fact that adrenaline made his hands less cooperative than they usually were.

Tanner reached up and very, very gently – more gently than anyone needed to – freed Q’s cock from the confines of his trousers. The touch of his skin, unreasonably soft, had a more electrifying effect on Q than the brief, impatient tugs he’d been intending for himself, and when Tanner responded to another yank on his head by opening his mouth, the job was done. 

He kept his eyes open, and as fixed on Q’s face as he was able, and Q could barely think to keep his hand tight on the back of Tanner’s head. The hand he’d used to coax Q fully hard went behind his back, with the other, and Tanner leaned precariously over his own body, the model of unasked-for but grotesquely-appreciated obedience.

He had a clever tongue, and however small his mouth looked it was capacious enough: Q flexed his fingers too hard on the back of Tanner’s neck and felt them ache from the beating, and sink into Tanner’s flesh like a relief. 

As pleasant, familiar tingles began beneath Q’s skin, preparing for the long, twitchy road towards orgasm, he took his uninjured hand, and almost sleepily cupped the underside of Tanner’s chin, the top of his throat. He didn’t squeeze, only held, with the intent and the possibility clamouring in his mind, just as they must clamour in Tanner’s.

Not squeezing became more difficult as his balls became more prominent in his mind, and Tanner’s nostrils flared visibly, trying to get enough air into him with a mouthful of cock. Q tried to concentrate on not saying anything, sure that as always, in the build-up to the last moment, he was going to say something spectacularly stupid, or weird, or outright disturbing.

In the end, he only swore, under his breath, and tightened his grip on both sides of Tanner’s neck until he was quite sure that his fingers had locked and that Tanner was probably going to die, and came.

He could feel his own hips dance spasmodically, and the panicked pulse of Henry Tanner under his fingers, and the sounds of someone beginning to choke, but when he focused Tanner was still peering up at him, with very watery eyes, and Q’s cock still between his lips.

Having concentrated so hard on not blurting something terrible, Q had no reserves of self-control left to prevent the other, and even more embarrassing side-effect of such a vicious and well-executed orgasm: the abrupt, uncharacteristic surge of tenderness and affection. In this instance they expressed themselves by pulling out of Tanner’s mouth – he remained kneeling with his mouth a little open, wheezing – and releasing his throat, only to fling himself down beside Tanner and give him the most awkward, bony, and heartfelt hug he was sure he had delivered in his life.

Tanner, rather than being taken aback or pointing out that he had what at this proximity Q could see was an insufferable hard-on, only buried his face against Q’s neck and started to laugh.

“That... was...” Tanner muttered, apparently either amused or delighted. 

Q pinched the back of his neck. “I said it had been a long time.”

“I wasn’t saying anything about it being over quickly,” Tanner said in a muffled voice, his lips wet and hot and unreasonably intimate against Q’s skin. Q thought that his lips were wet _because I just had my cock in his mouth_ and despite the draining of tension from his body the thought still pleased him. Ordinarily he would have been rendered uncomfortable and fed up by now, eager to get away, irritated by another person’s presence: then again, ordinarily the people he fucked didn’t really care who it was fucking them.

“You just did,” Q pointed out, pinching him again. He moved the hand he’d come close to throttling Tanner with, and it was light and bloodless and felt as if it belonged to someone else: he made a cursory stroke over Tanner’s chest – still intrigued by the texture of his scars – and laid his hand to rest on Tanner’s cock. It was hot, and hard, even through his jeans. 

Tanner made a restrained noise against Q’s neck.

Q squeezed experimentally.

“Jesus,” Tanner muttered.

“Get it out,” Q complained, too tired and too satiated to care if this was the best phrasing or the worst, if he should hold himself up to another standard or if he was about to make a fool of himself. He squeezed the back of Tanner’s neck, and Tanner made another noise into Q’s trapezium.

After a struggle, Tanner got as far as unbuttoning the whole of his fly, and Q shoved his arm out of the way by the wrist, and pushed his own hand inside. Very warm cotton met his fingers, and through the vent in Tanner’s underwear, the soft-to-touch and very warm skin of his cock.

Tanner’s breath was hot and wet on Q’s neck as he made a choked-off sound of what Q hoped was encouragement, and his hand stroked feebly at Q’s side, as if – Q was embarrassed by how much this thought appealed to him – he had lost the will to fight anyone off at all. As if he had had it choked out of him.

Q, his fingers half in and half out of Tanner’s underwear, flexed his hand on the back of Tanner’s neck – it hurt still – and leaned in to murmur in his ear, apropos of nothing, “You’re good.”

He didn’t mean the blowjob, which had been average, so much as the rest: his gentle obedience, the pliability of his body, and the rough moisture of his sounds. What Tanner _did_ wasn’t remarkable, but what he allowed to be _done_ was entirely worthy of the praise.

Tanner only sighed, and made a small upward motion with his hips: Q pushed his hand further into the warm darkness of Tanner’s underwear. With some difficult, he wrapped his hand around Tanner’s cock, and felt in that a pulse to match his own, fast and insistent.

It would have been easier had he taken it out: Q told himself afterward he had been considering the potential for ruining his shirt at such close range. At the time, he knew he enjoyed the pseudo-secrecy as they knelt together on the floor, the schoolboy furtiveness of it, the way it felt not calculated or sensibly adult, but like an impassioned act of defiance against some authority he couldn’t name.

Tanner’s half-stifled noises of approval, loose-lipped and limp, did little to avert this feeling of illicitness.

When _he_ came he made a sound that seemed to come right from the depths of his toes, and he made it right by Q’s ear. For a moment, as Q felt semen between his fingers and his own heart beating as if he’d just come a second time as well, Tanner slumped against him, panting a little.

Then he laughed once or twice, said, “Thank you,” in an embarrassed voice, and sat back so naturally that Q released his nape and his cock at once without thinking. 

“ _Thank_ you?” Q echoed, incredulous.

“Well,” Tanner grimaced, “I was raised to be polite. Unlike some people.”

“Oh shut up,” Q muttered, affirming his position in Tanner’s eyes as a rude bastard. He looked away, and down at his watch for the first time since his march to the Opera House, which seemed to have been several weeks ago rather than a few hours. When the numbers on his watch came into view, he swore. “It’s _two_.”

Tanner got to his feet: there was a dark patch on the crotch of his jeans, and he looked at it without any apparent embarrassment or dismay. He reached down to give Q a hand up, and Q – out of some undefined petty spite – gave him the hand still wet with Tanner’s come. He didn’t react, except to shake his head slightly, and pull Q up.

For a moment they stood facing each other, red-faced, flies undone, half-smiling but without direction or drive. 

“I’ve got to get up tomorrow,” Tanner said, apologetic. He made a vague motion with his second-hand damp hand, and Q watched the scars on his chest wrinkle with it.

“So have I,” Q said, remembering to do up his fly after a minute.

“Do you –“

“I don’t sleep well with other people,” Q said, before Tanner could offer or not offer or say anything else. He’d never tried, but the thought usually made his insides shrivel up into a wizened clove-hitch of disgust and anxiety, and he was too tired for any further novelty tonight.

“There’s the sofa,” Tanner said, as if Q couldn’t see it perfectly well. “I can get you a ... sleeping bag, I think.”

“I’ll be warm enough,” Q said, and there was another excruciating pause. Tanner looked at his shoes for a moment, and when he looked up Q began examining the tips of his own footwear with undue interest. 

“Goodnight, then,” Tanner said, breaking through the silence with an uncertain, small-mouthed smile. 

Q would have expected to lie awake all night on an unfamiliar sofa, but it was fifteen minutes at most before unconsciousness stole him, and separated him for a few hours from any worries that might have engulfed his mind.

He awoke to his phone beeping angrily about lack of battery, with the sun shouldering through a set of cream curtains and not much impeded by them, and his arm stuck down the back of some sofa cushions.

“Whrrr,” said Q, trying to rid himself of sleep amnesia and morning wood at the same time by slapping himself non-too-gently in the face. His hand hurt, and when he looked at the knuckles of it they were swollen and dark. “Fuck.”

He reached for his phone, which told him he was _very_ late, and then died from lack of battery. In reaching for it, he knocked an envelope onto the floor, which had apparently been resting on his chest. He picked it up, turned it over, and found on the transverse in Tanner’s by-now familiar hand:

“Had to leave for work. Help yourself to tea/breakfast etc. Close/slam door behind you when you leave. H.”

Q puzzled over this for a while. It was a bald, bland polite note with no indication of what to expect in future, and after picking up his glasses from the sofa arm (where they’d miraculously managed to stay all night) and putting them on to reread it he wasn’t any the wiser.

He forwent tea, and left Tanner’s flat. He was already late, Q thought, and he’d end up using the wrong mug or something. It wasn’t until he’d gone all the way down the stairs, nearly winding himself, and halfway down the road to Manor House (squinting in the aggressive sunshine), that he realised people outside of Q branch and various IT departments might not be so territorially precious about their crockery.

He came into his own offices around noon, after a set-to with the ticket barriers at Westminster and unfamiliar tube zones, sweating a little, and every hope he’d had of slipping in unnoticed was immediately and vigorously dashed.

Oladipo shouted, “What time do you call this, you lazy arse?” like an affronted schoolteacher, and Gulheed began chanting “Hail the conquering hero,” and cut herself off to cry, “Did you get lucky? That’s the same shirt as yesterday. I THINK Q GOT LAID.”

“Shut up,” Q muttered, lunging for the kettle.

“Look at this walk of shame,” Gulheed continued, ignoring him and gesturing to his shirt and uncombed hair with both hands. “Looooook at it. Look.”

Harris poked his head through the doorway, and subjected Q to the kind of toe-to-tip scrutiny he’d not had since M hired him. “Who the hell would sleep with _him_?” he concluded, sniffing. Harris had hayfever the way medieval Europe had the Black Death.

Gulheed pushed him back out with her shoulder to his chest. “Now, Nigel, there’s someone in the world for everyone,” she said, patting him on the shoulder in a manner that would have left Q grinding his teeth if she’d done it to him, and using Harris’s much-protested nickname (an inexplicable one: his legal name was Paul, but everyone had insisted that he looked like a Nigel and so Nigel had stuck, and harder the more Harris complained about it). “Maybe even for you. Of course, it might be Meade.”

“I’d rather do shots of ammonia,” Harris protested, curling his lip in disgust. His face was the ungainly red of high blood pressure. 

Meade, who’d looked up at the mention of his name, began explaining loudly and vehemently that he was straight to an audience of precisely no one.

Q dropped a teabag into his mug and poured boiling water over it without looking. He poked the bag around with the end of a pen, and just when the shouting had reached a cacophonous crescendo he said, “Please don’t for a moment think that I have any qualms whatsoever about putting every last one of you on H5X for the remainder of this week if you don’t shut up.”

The groans and complaints this generated, thought Q, bolting scalding hot tea, were enough to merit an afternoon with H5X in themselves. He let his team drift back to work, and stood draining his mug with the shaky hands of an addict. Gulheed lingered, and when he picked up the kettle a second time to refill it, she said in a confidential whisper:

“ _Did_ you get laid?”

Q didn’t have the energy for another bout of threats, and said, “You know there’s a cake shop in Covent Garden that sells cupcakes with glitter on them.”

She stared at him for a lot longer than he was comfortable with, and eventually said, in tones of considerable pity. “ _Yes_ , Q, leave your cave occasionally.”

Gulheed was actually wearing a headscarf with her E3 t-shirt today, which wasn’t any improvement, and which Q suspected had more to do with how long it had been since she washed her hair than a sudden spike in piety or modesty. It had a repeating pattern of Batman symbols on it, and if Q knew his team this had probably been commented on ad nauseum already. 

“So it _was_ a date, then?” she added.

“I don’t know,” Q muttered, in the face of all the evidence. He put the kettle back down without refilling it, but Gulheed ignored the hint and propped herself in the doorway so he couldn’t leave.

“Was he nice?” she demanded. Q had no idea how Gulheed categorised ‘nice’ – based on conversation her ideal partner was Altair and she had no time for men who couldn’t be controlled with a joypad of some sort – and no desire to tell her, but she stumbled on past his silence. “Are you going to see him again?”

Q turned the thought over in mute horror, reluctant to even consider it, and said, “Fucked if I know,” before turning to rest his forehead against the wall so firmly that he knocked his glasses off his face.

* * *

Two days galloped past without pause. A hiccup in data storage compounded a problem Meade had missed and turned it from a minor problem into a hellish nuisance, and Q was too busy trying to untangle it to engage in his usual public verbal flagellation of the culprit. Meade made the mistake of assuming this meant Q had mellowed, and only prudence and the presence of electronics kept Q from disproving his theory by throwing hot water at him.

Prudence and, after the fact, the memory of Tanner’s tight, ridged scars. _Kettle. Boiling water. That’s how_.

More days followed, and it wasn’t until the next Saturday that the pace of work slowed enough to allow him time to start fretting about Tanner.

In the end, still possessed of the tearing hurry and Solve Problem At Any Cost mindset which had dogged him all week, Q just put an appointment in Tanner’s ‘Private’ calendar for that evening, reading only “Q Branch”, and spent the rest of the day winding himself up. He combed his hair, then destroyed his efforts with convulsive twisting and fiddling; he tested security on all top tier admin accounts and made a list of the flaws; he checked Tanner’s calendar three or four times, and even thought about activating his webcam until he remembered how unhappy Tanner had been about it last time.

He walked a circuit of the office, found Meade dozing on his H5X assignment, woke him up and sent him home with a flea in his ear, deleted the overtime Meade had logged on payroll, and made himself an endless stream of cups of tea.

Q checked Tanner’s private calendar again, then in a fit of desperation checked his own work email account.

There was an email from Tanner with the subject line “Q” and the text of which simply read, “Have you heard of phones?” and which Q deleted hastily because the thing had yesterday’s date on it.

At six he gave up and started work on a small, private project involving a program for simulations of counterweights in industrial machinery to levels of precision that might only otherwise be achieved with laser guidance, and for a glorious thirty minutes he was unassailed by grinding worries.

After half an hour of blissful unconcern the office door opened and Tanner, still in a suit and carrying a folder, appeared like a vision of tense uncertainty.

“You’ve been busy, I take it,” Tanner said, laying the folder on Oladipo’s desk among the piles of other work. 

“Meade nearly triggered a meltdown of the security systems for half of the Western world,” Q said, holding his most recent cup of tea in both hands, and backing into the side of his desk. “And I had to juggle undoing his attempts to start World War Three with not launching more valuable equipment at his already objectionable face.”

“And after that?” Tanner said. 

“Pardon?”

“After you unfucked Meade’s fuck-up, which was reported done days ago?” Tanner asked, in a voice completely and carefully free of inflection of any sort.

Q readjusted his glasses, and held his tea up between himself and Tanner as a crude, tannin-based shield. “I, er,” he said, and in trying to find an excuse, shot for honesty by appalling accident. “I had a crippling attack of cowardice and lack of social skills,” he explained, hugging the tea to his chest. “For which I would, er, request a measure of forgiveness.”

“Really,” Tanner said. Q couldn’t quite work out if this boded ill or well.

“I’m a twat,” he said, getting to the nub of the argument and confirming several of his subordinates’ vocally-held opinions on his character.

Tanner gave no indication whether or not he agreed with this. “And you lured me here because?” he suggested, spreading his hands as if inviting Q to spew an answer into them.

“I... wanted to see you?” Q attempted. His head was starting to hurt.

Tanner came and took the tea out of his hands. He then stood, quite still, as if he was a security guard or a butler or some other invisible human furniture, just inside the circumference of what constituted a comfortable distance away. He said, with an unwavering gaze and only the very faintest of upturns at the corners of his mouth, “You _are_ a twat.”

“I know,” Q said, too confused to feel any kind of relief just yet.

“You could have just _said_ you wanted to see me,” Tanner pointed out, watching him. Q found it increasingly hard _not_ to try to evade his gaze. “The last I heard from you, you flounced off to sleep on my sofa. More than a week ago.”

“I didn’t _flounce_ ,” Q said, stung by being characterised – unfairly, he thought – as a prima donna when in all earnestness the term ‘pathologically uncomfortable prat’ was probably nearer the mark.

“Alright,” Tanner conceded, taking a step back. “You were very practical when I hoped you weren’t going to be.”

Emotional honest had never been Q’s favourite part of the human experience, and having it levelled at him was even less pleasant than his attempts to try it on himself. He cleared his throat a few times, reached for his tea, abandoned his tea, and sighed. 

“Come on,” he said, abruptly pushing himself away from the desk. He led the way to the bathrooms, checking every four steps to see if Tanner followed, which he did like a diligent shadow.

Q pushed open the door to the toilets, and made a quick inventory of the staff within: a round and ringing _none_. He peered into all of the cubicles in turn to be entirely sure of his initial estimation, and after recounting a second and third resounding _none_ he at last let Tanner follow him inside.

He closed the main door, locked it, and without waiting for his brain to catch up and _stop_ him, he seized Tanner by the wrist and pushed him against the closed door. Tanner went without any resistance and with a faint smile, even when his head hit the metal harder than Q had been expecting or intending for it to. 

Q pinned him there, by the wrist, and operating on the same _do it now or be damned_ mentality as before, he put his hand on the back of Tanner’s head and dragged his face closer in order to kiss him. He was acutely aware that he was no great shakes as a kisser, and that more than one person had recoiled in horror from his enthusiasm – which had somewhat dampened that enthusiasm in recent years – but, Q thought with a surge of aggression born of sudden terror, if he didn’t like it he could bloody well go. 

For a moment Tanner froze, and kissed back with such caution and gentleness that it was impossible to tell if he enjoyed it or was frantically working on a polite escape plan. Q tightened his grip in something approaching desperation, and the hands which must have been hovering tentatively somewhere around him came to rest on his chest. Tanner’s touch was so delicate then as to have been barely there at all, and rather than turning the kiss into a battle of wills and tongues, he only responded without leading.

Perhaps it was the tentativeness of his touch that prevented it from being, as most of Q’s experience of other people touching him was, a nauseatingly intrusive thing.

At last Q found he wasn’t breathing nearly enough to remain conscious, and with some reluctance he released Tanner’s mouth. Even from such close range he could see the man had gone a pleasing shade of pink.

Quite breathless, Q said, “I thought you’d say something about not during work hours,” which even he accepted was a feeble excuse.

Just as breathless, Tanner said, “I thought _you_ would. And anyway, it’s hardly work hours.”

“Well where _at_ work,” Q said, unable to let an opportunity for pedantry pass him by.

Tanner raised his eyebrows, and leaned into Q at the hips, which had the immediate effect of making Q forget what he was going to say. “Do you mind? Because I don’t.”

At a loss how to respond, Q tugged on the back of his neck again and released his wrist, holding his face instead as he strove to either shut him up or shut his own mind off or possibly murder them both with the length and intensity of the kiss. Tanner’s mouth was wetter now, but still on the pleasant side of moist, and with his second had freed he only clasped weakly at Q’s shoulder, as if Q were drowning him.

He knew, he _knew_ that he couldn’t be kissing that forcefully, but the effect of this exaggerated weakness in the face of his assault was the same: Q made an unwitting noise in his throat and pushed harder, let his hand drop from Tanner’s face and straight to his flies as if he had been drawn there by gravity. Tanner slumped against the door, his hips pushed towards Q’s hand, and made an equally involuntary noise against Q’s mouth.

The zip snapped under Q’s haste to open it, but he didn’t stop to apologise at the ruination of Tanner’s suit trousers: he only tugged too hard at the remainder of the zip until it burst open, and pushed his hand inside without pausing.

Tanner made another small, indistinct noise in his throat and kissed Q back with a little more vigour.

He was already hard. Q stroked the back of his head, wonderingly, and with his other hand squeezed Tanner through the fabric of his underwear. The warmth of his cock against his palm was giddying: Tanner’s body ran colder than his, he thought, but it only took a few minutes of kissing to turn him into a furnace. Q squeezed again, none too gently, and felt Tanner’s knees give a little, his mouth slacken, and another electrifying, intoxicating _grk_ fell from Tanner’s lips into Q’s open maw.

Q inhaled it, and kept kissing. It would have been the notion of the kind of irredeemable romantic that Q very much was _not_ to suggest it had taste or value beyond indicating as thoroughly as the hard cock under his hand that what he was doing was having the intended effect, but the idea of _eating_ the sounds of Tanner’s mouth appealed to him anyway. It was the part of him that did not readily obey sensible, logical suggestions: probably the same part, Q thought, later, that had bitten that idiot in the face.

He flexed his fingers, both against the short-shaven back of Tanner’s neck and against the cloth-swaddled weight of his cock, and he pressed his tongue over Tanner’s, holding it down without meeting any resistance at all. For what felt like no time, but was long enough that he felt himself growing dizzy from lack of air, Q played with Tanner through the soft cotton. He traced the outline of his cock over and over, with touch alone. He kissed on: he scooped the fabric behind Tanner’s cock to give himself a better grip, and he rubbed, stroked, squeezed, and flexed for long enough that a damp spot met his fingers.

Q rubbed the spot for a moment, until Tanner buckled against him, and with a start he finally pulled back from his mouth. “You’re not going to come yet, are you?” he asked. He meant _but I’m not finished with you_ , but it came out sounding like an instruction, and he liked the sound of that too much to clarify. The rush of air to his brain made him even more light-headed than before.

Tanner shook his head with some difficulty, breathing hard, and the hand on Q’s shoulder squeezed at it gently. In answer to Q rubbing his forefinger through the damp spot again, he bit into his own lip.

“If you want to,” Q said, warming to the idea, “you’re really going to have to ask nicely.”

Tanner nodded, and rather unexpectedly buried his face against Q’s shoulder – the one he didn’t already have his hand on. “Haha,” he said, in a weak voice.

“What?”

“You mean _beg_ ,” Tanner corrected, his face hidden. “Hah. Ah. Fuck.”

“Yes,” Q said, thinking about it. “I rather suppose I do.” He was about to ask – mindful at last that this might be going to far – if Tanner _minded_ this a great deal, but the man’s lips were already moving against Q’s shirt, mumbling something quiet and incoherent. “What?”

“I said I’m not going to last long,” Tanner said.

“You’ll last as long as I tell you to,” said Q, and the words made his skin tingle. He took a deep breath, and said, “Now beg, there’s a good fellow.”

“Twat,” Tanner said, rather distinctly, but with so much battling amusement and arousal in his voice that it almost sounded like affection. He still didn’t lift his face from Q’s shoulder, and Q wondered – on the basis of the last time he’d had his hand on Tanner’s cock – whether he merely enjoyed having it there. He wondered if _he_ enjoyed having it there, but decided this was far too much introspection for a situation that involved his hand on someone else’s penis.

After this, Tanner began actually asking, and Q stopped being as capable of introspection.

“Please,” he said, into Q’s shoulder, in a muffled, breathy voice. “P-please,” as Q ran his finger experimentally over the very tip of his cloth-clad cock, and Tanner’s breath and body jumped in time with the gentle throb of his pulse, “please can I—“

Q wished then that he’d lift up his head and let him see how red his face was, how desperate his eyes were, but he knew then too that if he did he’d only end up slamming the back of his head into the wall in _his_ desperation to kiss Tanner. He stroked the back of his neck instead. “Please can you what?” he murmured, almost into Tanner’s ear. “Please can you?”

Tanner struggled back to the beginning of the sentence again, his breath hot and moist between them. “Please, please can I come,” he muttered, and took a shuddering breath. “Please. May I. Come. Please.”

_You’ve done this before with someone else,_ Q thought, but the irrational desire to find that someone else and kick them in the neck wasn’t enough to distract him from the effects of Tanner’s uneven voice and sincere need _for his permission_ on his own body. 

“Please,” Tanner murmured, and as he took another breath Q let his hand fall from the back of his neck, seized the man’s wrist from off his shoulder, and shoved Tanner’s hand at his own crotch. He pressed it there until he was sure Tanner could feel. 

“Look what you’ve done to me,” Q said in a low voice.

He could feel Tanner’s mouth move into a smile against the front of his shoulder, but all Tanner said was, “... may I. Come?”

* * *

After the August bank holiday, Q found an appointment for himself in his calendar. He was mostly sure he hadn’t put it in himself, and would have been immediately suspicious were it not for the fact that admin staff had access to everyone’s calendars and that it only wanted him to visit Mallory’s office. Q thought about it for a while, frowned into his tea until Oladipo shouted, “OKAY I OWN UP _I_ POISONED IT,” and took out his phone.

He was not in the habit of storing phone numbers, in a vain attempt to practice what he preached regarding security, and it took him some time to find the right sector and encryption on his laptop for the address book. It took slightly longer to key in Tanner’s phone number, but this was because Harris was making a scene:

“HE’S USING AN ACTUAL PHONE TO ACTUALLY PHONE SOMEONE WITH HIS VOICE,” Harris barked. “I think the end times are upon us. Do we have a security protocol for this? A defence strategy?”

“Shut up,” Q muttered, hitting the dial button when he’d finally found it. “Unless you want to be on H5X until _October_.”

“Hello,” said Tanner, sounding wary. Q realised his number was probably both unfamiliar and masked.

“Do I _actually_ have an appointment to see Mallory,” Q said, “or are you mucking me about again?”

“Hello,” Gulheed said, raising her head on the other side of the office. “Something’s happening.”

“If you mean am I trying to haul you away from your batcave for nefarious purposes,” Tanner said in the tone of voice that said he was entirely alone wherever he was, “then I’m afraid I have to disappoint you.” He tutted theatrically. “You do still have a job to do, Mr Symmonds.”

“What’s it about?” Q asked, finding himself fiddling with his hair.

“I’m his assistant, not his mind-reader,” Tanner said. “And further to your original veiled enquiry, if you _want_ this appointment of yours to involve nefarious purposes I’m on lunch from two and amenable to being surprised.”

“Ah,” said Q, trying very hard to keep a straight face. “Right. Understood. That will be all.”

He arrive late for the appointment: in keeping with the unofficial traditions of MI6 headquarters, Mallory was apparently even later, and Q found himself alone in the anteroom with Eve, Eve’s unwanted health food of choice (some sort of red berries or pips that Q wasn’t familiar with or close enough to identify), and the stifling heat of a late August day gearing up for a storm that the open windows and feeble air conditioning unit in the corner did little to alleviate.

“Sorry,” Eve said, with a twist of her lips, “He’s had the Minister for Foreign Affairs in there since ten and I think he probably wants to gaffer tape her mouth shut by now.”

“Right,” said Q, then, “Do you have any idea why he wants to see me?”

Eve looked up at him for a long, long moment, and said, “You’re going to owe me drinks.”

“I don’t do –“

“Socialise, I know. But you’re still going to have to, or _I won’t tell you_.” She beamed at him, and tapped idly at her keyboard. “Anyway, you’re coming out on Thursday.”

“Am I?” Q asked. It was the first he’d heard about it. He took his glasses off, cleaned them, and put them back on again. “According to whom?”

Eve only raised her eyebrows, as if this was a very silly question, and Q sighed. “I believe,” Eve said, apparently relenting, “our illustrious master wants to ask you a lot of questions about H5X and what it is and why you keep allocating staff resources to it.”

“Meade’s been moaning,” Q translated.

Eve said, “We had an intern, she has this notion of necessary productivity and forgot to lose his complaint logs,” and yawned. She poked at her computer again. “You’ll be pleased to hear that they are _now_ in the shredder and off the log system, although I imagine less pleased to hear you now owe me dinner as well.”

“Curiously,” Q said, “less appalled than by the idea of ‘drinks’.” He dithered for a moment, and eventually applied himself to the Chesterfield. It was too hot, and he could feel the sun-warmed leather through his clothes, but it was preferable to dancing attendance on Eve like everyone else.

“I have this feeling,” Eve said, abandoning the computer in order to lean across the desk with a smirk that Q was sure would have reduced a lot of other men into quivering pulp, “that you’re a lot happier now.”

“Mind your own business,” Q sighed, straightening his shirt cuffs in a futile attempt to look less like one of Basement Branch, and trying to think of something convincing to say about H5X that wasn’t ‘my team are shits’.

Eve took no umbrage at this, only shook her head and said, “Tut, tut. Henry’s happiness _is_ my business.”

Without thinking, Q said, “Do you mean him or m-- _FUCK_.”

“Shh,” Eve said, pointing to the office door. She laughed quietly, and said, “Both.”

Q stared at his fingernails, his face growing hot even in the stuffy room. “Is Hawksmoor alright?”

“What?”

“For dinner.”

Eve grinned at him. “You’re a sweetheart.”

“You’re an evil harridan,” Q sighed. 

“I am informed by many,” Eve said, sitting back in her seat and adjusting her computer monitor by some miniscule degree, “that this is precisely why people like me.”

The door to Mallory’s office opened a smidgen, and Eve sat up straight, adjusted her dress, and wiped the wicked grin off her face, replacing it with something more wide-eyed and well-balanced. A bluebottle ruined the sudden stillness of the anteroom by battering itself stupidly against the closed half of the sash window, and in Mallory’s office a female voice raised to ask a final question, the door rocking on its hinges.

“If you’ll allow me, madam,” Tanner’s voice came through loud and clear, and the door opened all the way. 

It wasn’t Tanner who came out, though, but a tall woman in a cream skirt suit with impeccable dark brown hair whom Q assumed was the Minister for Foreign Affairs and who looked as if she’d gone ten round in the ring and then been asked to lick someone’s shoe. Q rather fancied he could see smoke coming out of her ears. She paid no attention to him, or to Eve – who cemented her reputation for professionalism and good conduct by making a face at the woman’s departing back – but steamed through the anteroom with her head up and her heels making no sound on the soft carpet, but some rather deep dents.

Q peered back into Mallory’s office, and found the silhouette of Tanner standing in the shadows of the door, an orange folder tucked under his arm, and the door propped open in his hand.

“Apologies for the delay,” he said, “M will see you now.”

Eve had returned to her red berries or pips or whatever they were without enthusiasm, and didn’t look up when Q stood, brushed nothing off his trousers, and made for the door. Tanner stood patiently just within: Q slipped past him, forcing himself not to meet his gaze, and stood before Mallory’s desk.

“Sorry about the delay,” said Mallory. “Have a seat.”

**Author's Note:**

> For the interested or even vaguely curious, the cake shop/cafe Q and Tanner go to is http://www.coventgardenlondonuk.com/eating-drinking/articles/couture-cakes-at-ellas-bakehouse Ella's. I thoroughly recommend it.


End file.
